Heavy quarks in deeply virtual Compton scattering

A detailed study of the heavy quark h=c,b,... contributions to deeply virtual Compton scattering is performed at both the amplitude and the cross section level, and their phenomenological relevance is discussed. For this purpose I calculate the lowest order off-forward photon-gluon scattering amplitude with a massive quark loop and the corresponding hard scattering coefficients. In a first numerical analysis these fixed order perturbation theory results are compared with the conventional intrinsic "massless" parton approach considering generalized parton distributions for the heavy quarks. The differences between these two prescriptions can be quite significant, especially at small skewedness where the massless approach largely overestimates the deeply virtual Compton scattering cross section.