Exclusive pion-induced Drell-Yan process at J-PARC for accessing the nucleon GPDs and soft nonfactorizable mechanism

Abstract: Generalized parton distributions (GPDs) encoding multidimensional information of hadron partonic structure appear as the building blocks in a factorized description of hard exclusive reactions. The nucleon GPDs have been accessed by deeply virtual Compton scattering and deeply virtual meson production with lepton beam. A complementary probe with hadron beam is shown to be the exclusive pion-induced Drell-Yan process, $\pi^- p \to \mu^+ \mu^- n$, as demonstrated by recent theoretical advances on describing this process in terms of QCD factorization as the partonic subprocess convoluted with the nucleon GPDs and the pion distribution amplitudes, and by the feasibility study for its measurement via a spectrometer at the High Momentum Beamline being constructed at J-PARC in Japan. We also discuss the possible soft partonic mechanisms beyond the QCD factorization framework, and present an estimate of the soft mechanisms at J-PARC kinematics, making use of dispersion relations and quark-hadron duality. Realization of the measurement of the exclusive pion-induced Drell-Yan process at J-PARC will provide a new test of QCD descriptions of a novel class of hard exclusive reactions, and also offer the possibility of experimentally accessing nucleon GPDs at large timelike virtuality.