Femtoscale imaging of the proton with Ioffe-time distributions

Abstract

Mapping how strongly interacting constituents are distributed within protons is a key goal of nuclear physics and a major direction of the future Electron Ion Collider program. We propose a novel space-time description of hadron structure in terms of impact-parameter Ioffe-time distributions, relating spatial density in the plane transverse to the proton momentum and the time between the probe's absorption and the product's emission in the longitudinal direction. Using lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, we perform the first calculation of the Ioffe-time-dependent mean squared proton radii and compare our results with estimates in the Goloskokov-Kroll model. We derive a relationship between the experimentally measurable Compton form factor and the generalized Ioffe-time distribution, which allows us to perform the first extraction of the Compton form factor from lattice calculations.