Deeply virtual meson production on neutrons

TL;DR

This paper explores how exclusive meson electroproduction on neutrons can enhance understanding of generalized parton distributions, offering distinctive experimental signatures and potential for precise measurements at Jefferson Laboratory.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of neutron-target meson production as a novel probe of GPDs, highlighting its unique features and experimental feasibility.

Findings

Neutron measurements complement proton GPD studies.

Charged meson production allows easy kinematic reconstruction.

Estimated cross-sections support experimental feasibility.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze in detail how the measurements of exclusive electroproduction of mesons on neutrons would complement the studies of generalized parton distributions (GPDs) of the proton, providing independent experimental observables. Some of these processes on neutrons have very distinctive features, and thus we expect that measurements on liquid deuterium would allow to clearly distinguish them from similar processes on protons, giving a very clean probe of the GPD. In the case of charged meson production, all produced hadrons are charged, and for this reason we expect that the kinematics of this process could be easily reconstructed. We estimate the cross-sections in the kinematics of the Jefferson Laboratory experiments using current phenomenological GPD models.