Nuclear-mass dependence of azimuthal beam-helicity and beam-charge asymmetries in deeply virtual Compton scattering

The nuclear-mass dependence of azimuthal cross-section asymmetries with respect to charge and longitudinal polarization of the lepton beam is studied for hard exclusive electroproduction of real photons. The observed beam-charge and beam-helicity asymmetries are attributed to the interference between the Bethe-Heitler and the deeply virtual Compton scattering processes. For various nuclei, the asymmetries are extracted for both coherent and incoherent-enriched regions, which involve different (combinations of) generalized parton distributions. For both regions, the asymmetries are compared to those for a free proton, and no nuclear-mass dependence is found.