  Due to multiple possible polarizations hard exclusive production of tensor
mesons by virtual photons or in heavy meson decays offers interesting
possibilities to study the helicity structure of the underlying short-distance
process. Motivated by the first measurement of the transition form factor
$\gamma^*\gamma \to f_2(1270)$ at large momentum transfers by the BELLE
collaboration we present an improved QCD analysis of this reaction in the
framework of collinear factorization including contributions of twist-three
quark-antiquark-gluon operators and an estimate of soft end-point corrections
using light-cone sum rules. The results appear to be in a very good agreement
with the data, in particular the predicted scaling behavior is reproduced in
all cases.
