Abstract We present the first high-twist study of the proton form factors F₁, ₂ (Q²) F 1, 2 (Q 2) in ep elastic scattering based on the perturbative QCD kT k T factorization, Q² Q 2 being momentum transfer squared. It is motivated by unexpectedly large higher-power contributions from subleading-twist light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs), which are attributed to the enhancement in endpoint regions of parton momentum fractions. We highlight that the endpoint enhancement, tamed by the kT k T resummation effect, is crucial for accommodating the approximate scaling behavior of the Q⁴F₁ (Q²) Q 4 F 1 (Q 2) data at intermediate Q² O (10) Q 2 ∼ O (10) GeV ² 2. The proton LCDAs up to twist 6 are then extracted, and verified by the charge-parity asymmetries observed in hadronic heavy baryon decays. Our work provides new insights into the proton three-dimensional structure and manifests the precision requirement for reliable perturbative analyses of baryonic exclusive processes.
Yu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.