GPDs from charged current meson production in $ep$ experiments

TL;DR

This paper proposes using charged current meson production in electron-proton experiments to probe generalized parton distributions, highlighting its advantages over other methods due to sensitivity and experimental feasibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to measure GPDs via charged current meson production, emphasizing its reduced contamination and experimental accessibility.

Findings

Cross-sections estimated for Jefferson Lab kinematics.

Process sensitive to unpolarized GPDs H and E.

Feasible measurement with high luminosity.

Abstract

We suggest that generalized parton distributions can be probed in charged current meson production process, $ep\to\nu_{e}\pi^{-}p$. In contrast to pion photoproduction, this process is sensitive to the unpolarized GPDs $H,\,E$, and for this reason has a very small contamination by higher twist and Bethe-Heitler type contributions. Since all produced hadrons are charged, we expect that the kinematics of this process could be easily reconstructed. We estimated the cross-sections in the kinematics of upgraded 12 GeV Jefferson Laboratory experiments and found that thanks to large luminosity the process can be measured with reasonable statistics.