Nucleon and pion gravitational form factors from near threshold heavy vector meson production

We propose a novel method to experimentally access the gravitational form factors (GFFs) of the nucleon and the charged pion in electron-proton scattering. We demonstrate that the cross sections of J/ψ-photoproduction and ϕ-electroproduction near threshold are dominated by the gluon GFF of the target to next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD. We predict cross sections for the Electron-Ion Collider and the Jefferson Lab experiments.