We extend the recently developed formalism to extract light-front quark charge densities from nucleon form factor data to the deformations of these quark charge densities when applying an external electric field. We show that the resulting induced polarizations can be extracted from proton generalized polarizabilities. The available data for the generalized electric polarizability of the proton yield a pronounced structure in its induced polarization at large transverse distances, which will be pinned down by forthcoming high precision virtual Compton scattering experiments.

• Received 15 November 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.112001