Compton Scattering and Nucleon Polarizabilities
Summary
Compton scattering of photons off nucleons provides a unique probe of the electromagnetic structure of protons and neutrons. In the low-energy regime, the nucleon’s response to an applied electromagnetic field is encoded in scalar and spin polarizabilities, which quantify the induced electric and magnetic dipole moments and higher-order deformations. Theoretical frameworks such as dispersion relations and chiral effective field theory yield predictions for these quantities, while modern experimental techniques—including real and virtual Compton scattering—offer increasingly precise determinations. The momentum dependence of generalized polarizabilities, accessible via virtual Compton scattering, reveals the spatial distribution of charge and magnetisation within the nucleon. Understanding nucleon polarizabilities is crucial for refining models of nucleon structure, interpreting two-photon-exchange corrections in precision spectroscopy, and constraining the dynamics of low-energy quantum chromodynamics.
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Compton Scattering and Nucleon Polarizabilities publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in compton scattering and nucleon polarizabilities across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Compton scattering: Elastic scattering of a photon by a charged particle, sensitive to the target’s electromagnetic structure.
Nucleon polarizabilities: Quantitative measures of a nucleon’s induced electric and magnetic dipole moments under an external electromagnetic field.
Virtual Compton scattering: Scattering process in which an incident virtual photon, provided by an electron beam, interacts with a nucleon, probing momentum-dependent structure.
Generalized polarizabilities: Momentum-transfer-dependent extensions of static polarizabilities, revealing spatial distributions of charge and magnetisation.
Chiral perturbation theory: Effective low-energy expansion of quantum chromodynamics based on chiral symmetry, used to calculate nucleon response functions.
References
- Nucleon electric and magnetic polarizabilities in holographic QCD. Physical Review D (2024).
- First Concurrent Extraction of the Leading-Order Scalar and Spin Proton Polarizabilities. Physical Review Letters (2022).
- Forward doubly-virtual Compton scattering off the nucleon in chiral perturbation theory: The subtraction function and moments of unpolarized structure functions. Physical Review D (2020).
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