DVCS at HERA

Abstract

We demonstrate that perturbative QCD allows one to calculate the absolute cross section of diffractive exclusive production of photons at large $Q^2$ at HERA, while the aligned jet model allows one to estimate the cross section for intermediate $Q^2 \sim 2 GeV^2$. Furthermore, we find that the imaginary part of the amplitude for the production of real photons is larger than the imaginary part of the corresponding DIS amplitude by a factor of about 2, leading to predictions of a significant counting rate for the current generation of experiments at HERA. We also find a large azimuthal angle asymmetry in $ep$ scattering for HERA kinematics which allows one to directly measure the real part of the DVCS amplitude and hence the nondiagonal parton distributions.