Deeply virtual electroproduction of photons and mesons on the nucleon : leading order amplitudes and power corrections

Abstract

We estimate the leading order amplitudes for exclusive photon and meson electroproduction reactions at large Q^2 in the valence region in terms of skewed quark distributions. As experimental investigations can currently only be envisaged at moderate values of Q^2, we estimate power corrections due to the intrinsic transverse momentum of the partons in the meson wavefunction and in the nucleon. To this aim the skewed parton distribution formalism is generalized so as to include the parton intrinsic transverse momentum dependence. Furthermore, for the meson electroproduction reactions, we calculate the soft overlap type contributions and compare with the leading order amplitudes. We give first estimates for these different power corrections in kinematics which are relevant for experiments in the near future.