Spin-flavor structure of chiral-odd GPDs in the large-N_c limit

We study the spin-flavor structure of the nucleon's chiral-odd generalized parton distributions (transversity GPDs) in the large-N_c limit of QCD. In contrast to the chiral-even case, only three combinations of the four chiral-odd GPDs are non-zero in the leading order of the 1/N_c expansion: E_T-bar = E_T + 2 H_T-tilde, H_T and E_T-tilde. The degeneracy is explained by the absence of spin-orbit interactions correlating the transverse momentum transfer with the transverse quark spin. It can also be deduced from the natural N_c-scaling of the quark-nucleon helicity amplitudes associated with the GPDs. In the GPD E_T-bar the flavor-singlet component u + d is leading in the 1/N_c expansion, while in H_T and E_T-tilde it is the flavor-nonsinglet components u - d. The large-N_c relations are consistent with the spin-flavor structure extracted from hard exclusive pi0 and eta electroproduction data, if it is assumed that the processes are mediated by twist-3 amplitudes involving the chiral-odd GPDs and the chiral-odd pseudoscalar meson distribution amplitudes.