Revealing transversity GPDs through the photoproduction of a photon and a $\rho$ meson

Abstract

Photoproduction of a pair of particles with large invariant mass is a natural extension of collinear QCD factorization theorems which have been much studied for deeply virtual Compton scattering and deeply virtual meson production. We discuss the production of a photon and a meson, where the wide angle Compton scattering on a meson subprocess factorizes from generalized parton distribution. We calculate at dominant twist and leading order in ${\alpha }_s$, the production cross-section of a transversely polarized $\rho$ meson which is sensitive to chiral-odd GPDs, and show that it may be measurable in near future JLab experiments.

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Physics Opportunities at an Electron-Ion Collider (POETIC6), September 7-11, 2015, Palaiseau, France. The numerical plot (fig.3) has been corrected. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1511.04371