Physics Colloquium

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the three-dimensional quark and gluon structure of the nucleon. In particular the concept of Generalized Parton Distributions promises an understanding of the generation of the charge, spin, and energy-momentum structure of the nucleon by its fundamental constituents. Forthcoming measurements with unprecedented accuracy at Jefferson Lab and at a future electron-ion collider will presumably challenge our quantitative description of the three-dimensional structure of hadrons. To fully exploit these future experimental data, new tools and models are currently being developed. After a brief reminder of what make Generalized Parton Distributions a unique tool to understand the nucleon structure, we will discuss the constraints provided by the existing measurements and review recent theoretical developments. We will explain why these developments naturally fit in a versatile software framework, named PARTONS, dedicated to the phenomenology and theory of GPDs.