Single-Transverse Spin Asymmetry in Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

We study the single-transverse spin asymmetry in semi-inclusive hadron production in deep inelastic scattering. We derive the leading contribution to the asymmetry at moderate transverse momentum $P_{h\perp }$ of the produced hadron in terms of twist-three quark-gluon correlation functions, and compare with the approach based on the factorization at fixed transverse momentum involving the asymmetric transverse-momentum and spin-dependent quark distribution. We verify that the two approaches yield identical results in this regime. By a comparison with our earlier calculations for the single-spin asymmetry in the Drell-Yan process we recover the well-established process-dependence of the time-reversal-odd transverse-momentum-dependent quark distributions that generate single-spin phenomena.

Comments: 17 pages, 3 figures