Coherent deeply virtual Compton scattering on helium-4 beyond leading power

Abstract

Coherent hard exclusive reactions on light nuclei provide access to their quark and gluon structure and enable three-dimensional tomography of these complex systems. We study deeply virtual Compton scattering on a helium-4 target, including both kinematic twist-3 and twist-4 corrections, as well as next-to-leading-order corrections to the twist-2 amplitude in the strong coupling ${\alpha }_s$. We show that these contributions are crucial for achieving a precise description of the data and, as a result, obtain the first tomographic image of the helium-4 nucleus at the quark-gluon level.