Exclusive production of a large mass photon pair

Abstract

We study the exclusive electroproduction of a photon pair in the kinematical regime where the diphoton invariant mass is large and where the nucleon flies almost in its original direction. We discuss the relative importance of the QCD process where the two photons originate from a quark line compared to the single (double) Bethe-Heitler processes where one (two) photons originate from the lepton line. This process turns out to be a promising tool to study generalized parton distributions in the nucleon, both at the medium energy of JLab and at a high energy electron ion collider.