We derive the cross-section for exclusive vector meson production in highenergy deeply inelastic scattering off a deuteron target that disintegratesinto a proton and a neutron carrying large relative momentum in the finalstate. This cross-section can be expressed in terms of a novel gluon TransitionGeneralized Parton Distribution (T-GPD); the hard scale in the final statemakes the T-GPD sensitive to the short distance nucleon-nucleon interaction. Weperform a toy model computation of this process in a perturbative framework anddiscuss the time scales that allow the separation of initial and final statedynamics in the T-GPD. We outline the more general computation based on thefactorization suggested by the toy computation: in particular, we discuss therelative role of "point-like" and "geometric" Fock configurations that controlthe parton dynamics of short range nucleon-nucleon scattering. With the aid ofexclusive $J/\Psi$ production data at HERA, as well as elastic nucleon-nucleoncross-sections, we estimate rates for exclusive deuteron photo-disintegrationat a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Our results, obtained usingconservative estimates of EIC integrated luminosities, suggest thatcenter-of-mass energies $s_{NN}\sim 12$ GeV$^2$ of the neutron-proton subsystemcan be accessed. We argue that the high energies of the EIC can addressoutstanding dynamical questions regarding the short-range quark-gluon structureof nuclear forces by providing clean gluon probes of such "knockout" exclusivereactions in light and heavy nuclei.
展开▼
