Extracting transition generalized parton distributions from hard exclusive pion-nucleon scattering
Jian-Wei Qiu, Zhite Yu
Abstract
We study the extraction of transition generalized parton distributions (GPDs) from production of two back-to-back high transverse momentum photons (<a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mi>γ</a:mi><a:mi>γ</a:mi></a:math>) and a massive pair of leptons (<c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:msup><c:mo>ℓ</c:mo><c:mo>+</c:mo></c:msup><c:msup><c:mo>ℓ</c:mo><c:mo>−</c:mo></c:msup></c:math>) in hard exclusive pion-nucleon scattering. We argue that the exclusive scattering amplitude of both processes could be factorized into nonperturbative pion distribution amplitude and nucleon transition GPDs that are convoluted with perturbatively calculable short-distance matching coefficients. We demonstrate that the exclusive diphoton production not only is complementary to the Drell-Yan-type dilepton production for extracting the GPDs but also provides enhanced sensitivities for extracting the parton momentum fraction <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><e:mi>x</e:mi></e:math> dependence of the GPDs. We show that both exclusive observables are physically measurable at the J-PARC and AMBER experiment energies. If the target nucleon can be polarized, corresponding spin asymmetries can offer additional sensitivities for extracting transition GPDs. Published by the American Physical Society 2024