Exclusive electroproduction revisited: treating kinematical effects

Abstract

Generalized parton distributions of the nucleon are accessed via exclusive leptoproduction of the real photon. While earlier analytical considerations of phenomenological observables were restricted to twist-three accuracy, i.e., taking into account only terms suppressed by a single power of the hard scale, in the present study we revisit this differential cross section within the helicity formalism and restore power-suppressed effects stemming from the process kinematics exactly. We restrict ourselves to the phenomenologically important case of lepton scattering off a longitudinally polarized nucleon, where the photon flips its helicity at most by one unit.