Speaker
Description
Introduced in the mid 90’s, Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) are now a key element in the study of the nucleon internal structure. Indeed, GPDs encapsulate both spatial and momentum distributions of partons inside a nucleon, and through the Ji sum rule, they also allow to derive the total orbital angular momentum of quarks.
GPDs are experimentally accessible through Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) and its interference with the Bethe-Heitler process at high momentum transfer Q². A worldwide experimental program was started in the early 2000’s to extract these GPDs. The subject of this presentation, a DVCS ep → epγ experiment performed at Jefferson Laboratory, Hall A (Virginia, USA) between 2014 and 2016, is encompassed in this program.
The aim of this experiment is to extract the DVCS helicity-dependent cross sections as a function of the momentum transfer Q², for fixed values of the Bjorken variable xB, on a proton target. The recent upgrade of the accelerator facility to 12 GeV allows to cover a larger lever arm in Q² than for previous measurements, while the polarized electron beam will allow the separation of the contributions from the real and imaginary parts of the DVCS amplitude to the total cross section.
This talk will present an overview of the ongoing data analysis for this experiment.
