Timelike Compton Scattering at LHC

Abstract

Exclusive photoproduction of dileptons, gamma N ->l+l- N, is and will be measured in ultraperipheralcollisions at hadron colliders. We demonstrate that the timelike deeply virtual Compton scattering (TCS) mechanism gamma q -> l+l- q, where the lepton pair comes from the subprocess gamma q -> gamma* q, dominates in some accessible kinematical regions, thus opening a new way to study generalized parton distributions (GPD) in the nucleon at small skewedness.

To appear in the proceedings of Excited QCD, Zakopane, Poland, 8-14 Feb 2009