GPDs from charged current meson production in $ep$ experiments

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.

Comments: 15 pages, 7 figures. Extension of the approach developed in arXiv:1210.4825, arXiv:1301.7014, arXiv:1401.1547 and arXiv:1611.07294 to the charged current electroproduction of pions