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Skewed Parton Distributions

Applications of perturbative QCD to deeply virtual Compton scattering and hard exclusive electroproduction processes require a generalization of usual parton distributions for the case when long-distance information is accumulated in nonforward matrix elements of quark and gluon light-cone operators. We describe two types of nonperturbative functions parametrizing such matrix elements: double distributions F(x,y;t) and skewed distribution functions F_ζ(X;t), discuss their properties, and basic uses in the QCD description of hard exclusive processes.