Next-to-leading Order Evolution of Transversity Distributions and Soffer's Inequality

Abstract

We present a calculation of the two-loop splitting functions for the evolution of the twist-2 `transversity' parton densities of transversely polarized nucleons. We study the implications of our results for Soffer's inequality for the case of valence quark densities.

Comments: 23 Pages, LaTeX, 2 figures as eps files, final, slightly modified version, to appear in Phys. Rev. D