Nucleon-to-pion transition distribution amplitudes: a challenge for PANDA

Abstract: Baryon-to-meson Transition Distribution Amplitudes (TDAs) appear as building blocks in the collinear factorized description of amplitudes for a class of hard exclusive reactions, prominent examples being hard exclusive pion electroproduction off a nucleon in the backward region and baryon-antibaryon annihilation into a pion and a lepton pair or a charmonium. Baryon-to-meson TDAs extend both the concepts of generalized parton distributions (GPDs) and baryon distribution amplitudes (DAs) encoding valuable complementary information on the hadronic structure. We review the basic properties of baryon-to-meson TDAs and discuss the perspectives for the experimental access with the PANDA detector.