Probing short-range nucleon-nucleon interactions with an Electron-Ion Collider

Understand

We derive the cross-section for exclusive vector meson production in high energy deeply inelastic scattering off a deuteron target that disintegrates into a proton and a neutron carrying large relative momentum in the final state.

• This cross-section can be expressed in terms of a novel gluon Transition Generalized Parton Distribution (T-GPD); the hard scale in the final state makes the T-GPD sensitive to the short distance nucleon-nucleon interaction.
• We perform a toy model computation of this process in a perturbative framework and discuss the time scales that allow the separation of initial and final state dynamics in the T-GPD.
• We outline the more general computation based on the factorization suggested by the toy computation: in particular, we discuss the relative role of "point-like" and "geometric" Fock configurations that control the parton dynamics of short range nucleon-nucleon scattering.