Speaker
Description
Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) are nowadays the object of an intense effort of research,
in the perspective of understanding nucleon structure. They describe the correlations between
the longitudinal momentum and the transverse spatial position of the partons inside the nucleon
and they can give access to the contribution of the orbital momentum of the quarks to the nucleon
spin.
Deeply Virtual Compton scattering (DVCS), the electroproduction on the nucleon, at the quark
level, of a real photon, is the process more directly interpretable in terms of GPDs of the nucleon.
Depending on the target nucleon (proton or neutron) and on the DVCS observable extracted
(cross sections, target- or beam-spin asymmetries, ...), different sensitivity to the various GPDs
for each quark flavor can be exploited. GPDs can also be accessed in other reactions, such as
Timelike Compton Scattering, Double DVCS, or the exclusive electroproduction of mesons.
This talk will provide an overview on recent and new, promising, GPD-related experimental
results, mainly obtained at Jefferson Lab with a 12-GeV electron beam, for various target types
and final states. These data open the way to a “tomographic” representation of the structure of
the nucleon, allowing the extraction of transverse space densities of the quarks at fixed
longitudinal momentum, as well as providing an insight on the distribution of forces inside the
nucleon.
The perspectives for future JLab experiments using a polarized positrons beam will also be
outlined.
