First Extraction of Transversity from a Global Analysis of Electron-Proton and Proton-Proton Data

Abstract

We present the first extraction of the transversity distribution in the framework of collinear factorization based on the global analysis of pion-pair production in deep-inelastic scattering off transversely polarized targets and in proton-proton collisions with one transversely polarized proton. The extraction relies on the knowledge of di-hadron fragmentation functions, which are taken from the analysis of electron-positron annihilation data. For the first time, the chiral-odd transversity is extracted from a global analysis similar to what is usually done for the chiral-even spin-averaged and helicity distributions. The knowledge of transversity is important for, among other things, detecting possible signals of new physics in high-precision low-energy experiments.

Comments: version identical to published one; supplemental material available at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.192001