Hard Exclusive Electroproduction of Pions

Abstract

We investigate the exclusive electroproduction of pi^+ mesons from nucleons. To leading twist, leading order alpha_s accuracy the corresponding production amplitude can be decomposed into pseudovector and pseudoscalar parts. Both can be expressed in terms of quark double distribution functions of the nucleon. While the pseudovector contribution is connected to ordinary polarized quark distributions, the pseudoscalar part can be related to one pion t-channel exchange. We observe that the pseudovector part of the production amplitude is important at x < 0.1. On the other hand, for 0.1 < x < 0.4 contributions from one pion exchange dominate.

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