# 1 From diagonal to off-diagonal parton distributions

## 1 From diagonal to off-diagonal parton distributions

Off-diagonal (also called off-forward or nonforward) parton distributions have enjoyed considerable interest since it was realised that they allow the description of certain exclusive reactions in the framework of QCD factorisation. A good physics example to see how they come about and how they are connected with the usual, diagonal parton distributions, is the virtual Compton scattering amplitude. Let us therefore start with the forward amplitude $`\gamma ^{}p\gamma ^{}p`$, whose imaginary part gives the cross section of inclusive deep inelastic scattering $`\gamma ^{}pX`$ via the optical theorem. In the Bjorken limit this can be calculated as a perturbative parton-photon scattering times a parton distribution in the proton; the Born level diagram is shown in Fig. 1 (a). The on-shell condition for the parton line across the cut fixes the momentum fraction $`x`$ of the parton in the proton to be $`x_B`$.

If we omit the cut of the diagram and replace the $`\gamma ^{}`$ on the right-hand side with a real photon then we obtain Fig. 1 (b), which describes the amplitude of the exclusive process $`\gamma ^{}p\gamma p`$. Since there is now a transfer of momentum between the proton on the left and on the right the momentum fractions of the two partons attached to the lower blob are no longer the same. This blob is described by an *off-diagonal* parton distribution, given as a Fourier transformed matrix element of an operator between two *different* proton states. The factorisation shown in Fig. 1 (b) holds in the regime of deep virtual Compton scattering (DVCS), where in addition to the usual Bjorken limit of large $`Q^2=q^2`$ and fixed $`x_B=Q^2/(2pq)`$ we require $`t=(pp^{})^2`$ to be small and fixed. Even at Born level we now have to perform a loop integral over $`x`$; external kinematics fixes the difference $`xx^{}x_B`$, where both fractions $`x`$ and $`x^{}`$ refer to the incident proton momentum $`p`$.

It can be shown that the proton-parton blob in Fig. 1 (b) is effectively a *cut* amplitude, although it appears in the $`\gamma ^{}p\gamma p`$ amplitude which is not cut. The off-diagonal distributions thus become equal to the usual, diagonal ones in the limit where $`p=p^{}`$. Having a cut amplitude is also important for the parton interpretation of these quantities. The usual distributions represent the squared amplitude and thus the probability for the proton emitting a parton with momentum fraction $`x`$ and any number of spectators, summed over all spectator configurations. In contrast the new distributions involve the amplitude for parton emission with a fraction $`x`$ times the conjugated amplitude with different fraction as shown in Fig. 2; they therefore correspond to the *interference* between two different parton emission processes.

Such an “interference experiment” can be expected to provide new insight into the proton structure. To see why let us take a numerical example with $`x_B=0.3`$ and $`x=0.4`$. The parton emission at the l.h.s. of Fig. 2 takes then place at a value of $`x`$ where the usual valence quark distributions dominate over sea quarks and spectator systems with few partons are preferred: having a large number of partons in a proton state is difficult when most of the proton momentum is already taken away by one parton. At the r.h.s. of the figure the situation is just the opposite since the fraction $`x^{}=0.1`$ is rather small, and a rather large number of spectators could be accommodated. As one forces the spectator systems to be the same on the left and on the right the proton is put into a quite unusual dynamical situation, and its response will be sensitive to how the proton wave function is made up from states with different parton content and configuration.

There is another regime which does not occur in usual parton distributions because it is due to the kinematic asymmetry of the two protons: this is when $`x>0`$ but $`x^{}<0`$. Re-interpreting the parton with negative momentum fraction $`x^{}`$ as an antiparton with positive fraction $`x^{}`$ one then has the picture of the proton $`p`$ emitting a parton-antiparton pair and being left as proton $`p^{}`$. This is reminiscent of a meson distribution amplitude, which describes the transition between a meson and a parton-antiparton pair.

A special role is played by the point where $`x=x_B`$ and accordingly $`x^{}=0`$. Note that this configuration gives the imaginary part of the DVCS amplitude in Fig. 1 (b) since putting the parton line between the two photons on mass shell leads to the same kinematical condition as in deep inelastic scattering, Fig. 1 (a). For the parton distribution our numerical example above has now been pushed to its extreme: while the parton on the l.h.s. of the proton-parton blob has some finite fraction $`x_B`$ the one on the r.h.s is *very* slow ($`x^{}=0`$ should be understood as up to small corrections because the condition $`x=x_B`$ is obtained by neglecting for instance the transverse momentum of the parton in the proton).

Like their diagonal counterparts the off-diagonal distributions are universal quantities, which do not only occur in the Compton amplitude. It has been shown that the production of a meson from a longitudinally polarised virtual photon can be described in the limit of large $`Q^2`$ and small $`t`$ by a hard scattering, the quark-antiquark distribution amplitude of the meson, and off-diagonal quark or gluon distributions in the nucleon. This factorisation is shown in Fig. 3. Beyond Born level in the hard scattering the off-diagonal gluon distribution also contributes to DVCS, with the two gluons coupling to the two photons via a quark loop.

As in other cases of QCD factorisation the mechanisms shown in Fig. 1 and 3 are dominant if the hard scale $`Q^2`$ is sufficiently large, with corrections to them being suppressed in powers of $`1/Q`$. A source for such corrections in DVCS is for instance the hadronic component of the outgoing real photon, which is not described by a pointlike coupling as in Fig. 1 (b). One can expect this correction to be more important in DVCS than in inclusive DIS, both photons in Fig. 1 (a) being highly virtual. The values of $`Q^2`$ where power corrections can be neglected may thus well be different for different processes, and the importance of such corrections will have to be studied empirically for each case. On one hand one must control such corrections if one wants to extract the off-diagonal parton distributions that appear in the leading mechanism, and on the other hand the relative importance of power corrections in similar situations may guide us towards a better understanding of these corrections themselves.

The most immediate test is of course that of scaling: up to logarithmic terms the DVCS amplitude should become independent of $`Q^2`$ at fixed $`x_B`$ and $`t`$, which exactly corresponds to Bjorken scaling in inclusive DIS. The production amplitude of a meson from a longitudinal photon is predicted to behave as $`1/Q`$ times logarithms in the Bjorken limit (for transverse photons, where the factorisation of Fig. 3 does not hold, a decrease like $`1/Q^2`$ is obtained from power counting arguments).

## 2 Spin selection rules in the hard scattering

We shall now see that more detailed tests for the dominance of the leading twist contributions can be constructed from helicity selection rules obeyed by the hard scattering.

In DVCS one finds that to leading order in $`1/Q`$ the helicities of the initial and final state photons must be the same. In the hard quark-photon or antiquark-photon scattering of Fig. 1 (b) one can neglect the quark mass and the transverse momentum transfer to the photon, both of which are small compared with $`Q`$. Zero quark mass implies that the scattering cannot change the parton helicity due to chiral invariance, and zero transverse momentum transfer means collinear scattering, so that the angular momentum along the collision axis is given by the particle helicities. Angular momentum conservation then imposes that the photon cannot change its helicity because the parton does not.

DVCS is measured in electroproduction, $`epep\gamma `$, with the lepton $`e`$ being scattered at large angle and emitting a highly virtual photon. The dependence of the $`ep`$ cross section on the azimuthal angle $`\phi `$ between the lepton plane and the proton-photon plane, defined in the c.m. of the scattered proton and photon, contains information on the virtual photon polarisation: different helicity amplitudes of the $`\gamma ^{}p\gamma p`$ process give characteristic terms in the $`\phi `$-distribution, which can thus be used to test in a model-independent way our above helicity selection rule.

The phenomenology of $`epep\gamma `$ is very rich because Compton scattering interferes with the Bethe-Heitler process, where the final state photon is emitted from the lepton. Within the kinematical region defining DVCS either of these processes can dominate, depending mainly on the $`ep`$ collision energy. The interference term between the two mechanisms is of particular interest: since the Bethe-Heitler process is completely calculable it allows to investigate DVCS at *amplitude* level. Let us also mention that the imaginary part of the DVCS amplitude, which as discussed above is very interesting in connection with the dynamics of off-diagonal distributions, can be accessed via the single spin asymmetry for longitudinal lepton beam polarisation.

Along the same lines as for DVCS one can establish that in vector meson production at leading order in $`1/Q`$ the meson carries longitudinal polarisation. Together with the dominance of longitudinal photons already mentioned this leaves us with a single photon-meson helicity combination in the large-$`Q^2`$ limit. As in DVCS one can investigate the virtual photon polarisation using the azimuth between the leptonic and the hadronic plane, while the meson polarisation is analysed by its decay distribution and offers a further handle to see whether a given $`Q^2`$ is “large”.

## 3 Spin in the off-diagonal distributions

Unlike a hard scattering subprocess the off-diagonal distributions, which describe soft physics, are sensitive to a transverse deflection of the proton by a few 100 MeV. This invalidates spin selection rules whose derivation assumes a collinear situation. The result is a richer structure in proton and parton spin than the one for diagonal distributions.

### 3.1 Quark and antiquark distributions

If neither parton nor proton helicity are flipped there are two independent proton-parton amplitudes, with the parton and proton spins being parallel or antiparallel. Taking their sum (difference) one obtains parton spin independent (dependent) distributions, which in the diagonal limit become the usual distributions $`q(x)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }q(x)`$, resp. Two more off-diagonal distributions correspond to the case where the proton spin is changed. For them the sum of proton and parton spins is not conserved and angular momentum conservation is restored by orbital angular momentum. That these distributions carry indeed information on orbital angular momentum is also seen at the level of the sum rules they obey.

In DVCS all four of these distributions contribute to the cross section, even when the polarisations of incident and scattered proton are not measured. Knowledge of proton polarisation *is* however required if one wants to disentangle the different distributions from the cross section. For meson production the situation is somewhat different: the production of vector mesons only picks out the parton spin independent distributions and pseudoscalar meson production only selects the parton spin dependent ones.

There are also chiral-odd distributions, where the helicity of the quark or antiquark is flipped; one of them becomes equal to the so-called transversity distribution in the diagonal limit. The original hope  that they may be measurable in the production of a transverse vector meson from a longitudinal photon has unfortunately not come true, because as mentioned above the hard scattering process forbids such a transition.

### 3.2 Gluon distributions

For gluons there are again amplitudes corresponding to the usual spin independent and spin dependent gluons distributions, as well as rather exotic *gluon helicity flip* amplitudes, the latter changing the gluon spin by two units.

Vector meson production at large $`Q^2`$ only involves the gluon spin independent distributions, at least to leading order in $`\alpha _s`$ In DVCS the gluon helicity flip distributions do occur at the level of radiative corrections. For gluons there is no equivalent of chirality conservation, which we used for quarks, and the hard scattering compensates the gluon helicity flip by also flipping the photon helicity by two units. Our above helicity selection rule for DVCS thus acquires a distinct $`O(\alpha _s)`$ correction: gluon exchange allows for transitions between two different transverse polarisations, but not from a longitudinal to a transverse photon. This has again a clear signature in the distribution of the azimuth $`\phi `$ discussed above.

## Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge discussions with J.P. Ralston and O.V. Teryaev. This work has been partially funded through the European TMR Contract No. FMRX-CT96-0008: Hadronic Physics with High Energy Electromagnetic Probes. SUBATECH is Unité mixte 6457 de l’Université de Nantes, de l’Ecole des Mines de Nantes et de l’IN2P3/CNRS, and CPhT is Unité mixte 7644 du CNRS.