Studying the neutron orbital structure by coherent hard exclusive processes off 3He

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how coherent hard exclusive processes off 3He can be used to access neutron GPDs, providing a new method to study neutron orbital structure through nuclear effects in low momentum transfer regions.

Contribution

It introduces a simple extraction procedure for neutron GPDs from 3He data, accounting for nuclear effects within an Impulse Approximation framework.

Findings

Neutron contribution dominates GPDs H and E in low momentum transfer.

Proposed extraction method effectively isolates neutron GPDs from nuclear data.

3He can serve as a valuable target for neutron structure studies.

Abstract

Hard exclusive processes, such as Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS), allow to access generalized parton distributions (GPDs). By means of an Impulse Approximation (IA) calculation, it is shown here how, in the low momentum transfer region, the sum of the GPDs H and E is dominated by the neutron contribution. Thanks to this property, 3He could open a new way to access the neutron structure information. In this work, a simple and efficient extraction procedure of the neutron GPDs, able to take into account the nuclear effects included in IA analysis, is proposed.