Conventional nuclear effects on generalized parton distributions of trinucleons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how conventional nuclear effects influence the generalized parton distributions of trinucleons, highlighting the importance of careful analysis to distinguish these from potential exotic phenomena.

Contribution

It provides a realistic microscopic evaluation of nuclear effects on 3He GPDs, emphasizing their significance over forward case effects and the potential of 3He and 3H targets for discrimination.

Findings

Conventional nuclear effects are larger in GPDs than in forward distributions.

Misinterpreting nuclear effects could lead to false signals of exotic phenomena.

3He and 3H targets are crucial for disentangling conventional and exotic effects.

Abstract

The measurement of nuclear Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) will represent a valuable tool to understand the structure of bound nucleons in the nuclear medium, as well as the role of non-nucleonic degrees of freedom in the phenomenology of hard scattering off nuclei. By using a realistic microscopic approach for the evaluation of GPDs of 3He, it will be shown that conventional nuclear effects, such as isospin and binding ones, or the uncertainty related to the use of a given nucleon-nucleon potential, are rather bigger than in the forward case. These findings suggest that, if great attention is not paid to infer the properties of nuclear GPDs from those of nuclear parton distributions, conventional nuclear effects can be easily mistaken for exotic ones. It is stressed therefore that 3He, for which the best realistic calculations are possible, represents a unique target to discriminate between conventional and exotic effects. The complementary information which could be obtained by using a 3H target is also addressed.