ROTATIONAL COVARIANCE AND LIGHT-FRONT CURRENT MATRIX-ELEMENTS

Light-front current matrix elements for elastic scattering from hadron s with spin 1 or greater must satisfy a nontrivial constraint associat ed with the requirement of rotational covariance for the current opera tor. Using a model rho meson as a prototype for hadronic quark models, this constraint and its implications are studied at both low and high momentum transfers. In the kinematic region appropriate for asymptoti c QCD, helicity rules, together with the rotational covariance conditi on, yield an additional relation between the light-front current matri x elements.