A New Mechanism for Single Spin Asymmetries in Strong Interactions

Abstract

It is shown that the contribution of the instantons to the fragmentation of quarks leads to the appearance of a imaginary part in diagrams of quark-quark scattering at large transfer momentum. The imaginary part comes from the analytical continuation of the instanton amplitudes from Euclidean to Minkowsky space-time and reflects quasiclassical origin of instanton solution of QCD equations of motion. This phenomenon and instanton--induced quark spin-flip give a new nonperturbative mechanism for the observed anomalous single-spin asymmetries in hadron-hadron and lepton-hadron interactions.

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, Latex; final version to appear in JETP Lett