Abstract
We report on the first measurement of the beam-spin asymmetry in the exclusive process of coherent deeply virtual Compton scattering off a nucleus. The experiment uses the 6 GeV electron beam from the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) accelerator at Jefferson Lab incident on a pressurized 4He gaseous target placed in front of the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS). The scattered electron is detected by CLAS and the photon by a dedicated electromagnetic calorimeter at forward angles. To ensure the exclusivity of the process, a specially designed radial time projection chamber is used to detect the recoiling 4He nuclei. We measure beam-spin asymmetries larger than those observed on the free proton in the same kinematic domain. From these, we are able to extract, in a model-independent way, the real and imaginary parts of the only 4He Compton form factor, ℋA. This first measurement of coherent deeply virtual Compton scattering on the 4He nucleus, with a fully exclusive final state via nuclear recoil tagging, leads the way toward 3D imaging of the partonic structure of nuclei.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-15-2017
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.202004
Funding Information
This work was supported in part by the Chilean Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT), the Italian Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357, the United Kingdom Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA), the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Office of Research and Economic Development at Mississippi State University. The Southeastern Universities Research Association operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility for the United States Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-06OR23177.
Repository Citation
Hattawy, M.; Baltzell, N. A.; Dupré, R.; Hafidi, K.; Stepanyan, S.; Bültmann, S.; De Vita, R.; El Alaoui, A.; El Fassi, L.; Egiyan, H.; Girod, F. X.; Guidal, M.; Jenkins, D.; Liuti, S.; Perrin, Y.; Torayev, B.; Voutier, E.; Adhikari, K. P.; Adhikari, S.; Adikaram, D.; Akbar, Z.; Amaryan, M. J.; Anefalos Pereira, S.; Armstrong, Whitney R.; Avakian, H.; Ball, J.; Bashkanov, M.; Battaglieri, M.; Batourine, V.; Bedlinskiy, I.; and Gohn, Wesley P., "First Exclusive Measurement of Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering Off 4He: Toward the 3D Tomography of Nuclei" (2017). Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications. 538.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/physastron_facpub/538
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Physical Review Letters, v. 119, issue 20, 202004, p. 1-7.
© 2017 American Physical Society
The copyright holder has granted permission for posting the article here.
Due to the large number of authors, only the first 30 and the authors affiliated with the University of Kentucky are listed in the author section above. For the complete list of authors, please download this article or visit: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.202004
This group of authors is collectively known as the CLAS Collaboration.