DVCS and GPDs at eRHIC: towards a high resolution partonic imaging

The feasibility for a measurement of the exclusive production of a real photon, a process although known as Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) at an eRHIC has been explored. An electron-proton/ion collider facility (eRHIC) is under consideration at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Such a new facility will require the design and construction of a new optimized detector profiting from the experience gained from electron-proton colliders like at the experiments H1 and ZEUS at DESY-HERA. In particular, eRHIC is a machine designed to collide an electron beam with energies ranging from 5 GeV up to 20 GeV with the RHIC hadron beams (protons (100-250 GeV) and nuclei (<= 100 GeV)), thus varying center-of-mass energies. DVCS is universally believed to be a golden measurement toward the determination of the Generalized Parton Distribution (GPDs) functions. The high luminosity of the machine, expected in the order of 10(34) cm(2)s(-1) at the highest center-of-mass energy, together with the large rapidity acceptance of a newly designed dedicated detector, will open the opportunity for measuring DVCS with an unprecedented precision, providing an important tool toward a 2+1 dimensional picture of the internal structure of the proton. The huge impact such measurements would have on the determination of GPDs will be discussed.