Deeply virtual Compton scattering in Hall A at Jefferson Lab

Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs), introduced in the late 90s, provide a universal description of hadrons in terms of the underlying degrees of freedom of Quantum Chromodynamics: quarks and gluons. GPDs appear in a wide variety of hard exclusive reactions and the advent of high luminosity accelerator facilities has made the study of GPDs accessible to experiment. Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) is the golden process involving GPDs. The first dedicated DVCS experiment ran in the Hall A of Jefferson Lab in Fall 2004. An electromagnetic calorimeter and a plastic scintillator detector were constructed for this experiment, together with specific electronics and acquisition system. The experiment preparation, data taking and analysis are described in this document. Results on the absolute cross section difference for opposite beam helicities provide the first measurement of a linear combination of GPDs as a function of the momentum transfer to the nucleon.