On Extraction of Twist-Two Compton Form Factors from DVCS Observables Through Harmonic Analysis

Abstract

We investigate the exercise of locally extracting the real and imaginary parts of the four twist-2 Compton form factors (CFFs) $\{\mathcal{H},\mathcal{E},\widetilde{\mathcal{H}},\widetilde{\mathcal{E}}\}$ which arise in the deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) process $e + p \rightarrow e + p + \gamma$. Neglecting dynamical higher-twist contributions, we find that there are a sufficient number of DVCS observables and degrees of freedom to extract all 8 leading quantities model-independently, exploiting the azimuthal dependence of the absolute cross sections across all possible beam and target polarizations at a common kinematical point in $\{Q,t,x_B,y\}$. As an example, for typical JLab lab-frame kinematics, we simplify the reduced DVCS observables to their dominant terms, providing a sufficient number of equations for local determination of the twist-2 CFFs. We demonstrate the feasibility using harmonic fitting to both cross sections and beam spin asymmetries with both real and pseudo-data.