Exclusive electroproduction of lepton pairs as a probe of nucleon structure

A. V. Belitsky, D. Müller

Published 2002-10-23, updated 2002-10-24Version 2

We suggest the measurement of exclusive electroproduction of lepton pairs as a tool to study inter-parton correlations in the nucleon via generalized parton distributions in the kinematical region where this process is light-cone dominated. We demonstrate how the single beam-spin asymmetry allows to perform such kind of analysis and give a number of predictions for several experimental setups. We comment on other observables which allow for a clean separation of different species of generalized parton distributions.