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Transverse Single-Spin Asymmetries: Challenges and Recent Progress

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Abstract

Transverse single-spin asymmetries are among the most intriguing observables in hadronic physics. Though such asymmetries were already measured for the first time about four decades ago, their origin is still under debate. Here we consider transverse single-spin asymmetries in semi-inclusive lepton–nucleon scattering, in nucleon–nucleon scattering, and in inclusive lepton–nucleon scattering. It is argued that, according to recent work, the single-spin asymmetries for those three processes may be simultaneously described in perturbative QCD, where the re-scattering of the active partons plays a crucial role. A comparison of single-spin asymmetries in different reactions can also shed light on the universality of transverse momentum dependent parton correlation functions. In particular, we discuss what existing data may tell us about the predicted process dependence of the Sivers function.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Temple University, 1925 N. 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Andreas Metz

  2. RIKEN BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, 11973, USA

    Daniel Pitonyak

  3. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Regensburg University, Universitätsstraße 31, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

    Andreas Schäfer & Jian Zhou

  4. Institute for Theoretical Physics, Tübingen University, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Marc Schlegel & Werner Vogelsang

Authors
  1. Andreas Metz
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  2. Daniel Pitonyak
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  3. Andreas Schäfer
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  4. Marc Schlegel
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  5. Werner Vogelsang
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  6. Jian Zhou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Metz.

Additional information

This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1205942 (A.M.), the RIKEN BNL Research Center (D.P.), and by the BMBF under Grant No. OR 06RY9191 (J.Z).

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Metz, A., Pitonyak, D., Schäfer, A. et al. Transverse Single-Spin Asymmetries: Challenges and Recent Progress. Few-Body Syst 56, 331–336 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00601-014-0929-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00601-014-0929-9

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