General Parton Distributions and Counting of Helicity-Flip Nucleon Form Factors

Abstract

We give a brief overview of the General Parton Distributions(GPDs), including their properties, connections to conventional quantities, and relationships to physical observables. We also perform a systematic analysis on the non-forward matrix elements of twist-two quark and gluon helicity-flip operators and explain their relationships to the GPDs. We systematically count the number of independent nucleon form factors in non-forward scattering (of matrix elements of these operators), by matching the allowed quantum numbers with their crossing channel counterparts and time reversal symmetry considerations. We finally analyze and write down the form factor expansion of the quark operator matrix elements.