English

NLO corrections and factorization for transverse single-spin asymmetries

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-12-18 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

We present next-to-leading order QCD corrections for the cross sections for phX\ell p^\uparrow\to hX, pjetX\ell p^\uparrow\to {\mathrm{jet}}X with transversely polarized initial protons. These cross sections are known to be power-suppressed in QCD and probe twist-3 parton correlation functions in the proton. Our calculation exhibits the full complexity of a perturbative QCD analysis beyond leading power, involving in particular various derivatives of the parton correlation functions. We demonstrate that collinear factorization for these single-spin observables holds at one loop. We also present exploratory phenomenological results for the NLO single-spin asymmetry in ephXep^\uparrow\to hX and compare to data from the HERMES experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.16097,
  title  = {NLO corrections and factorization for transverse single-spin asymmetries},
  author = {Daniel Rein and Marc Schlegel and Patrick Tollkühn and Werner Vogelsang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16097},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor revisions to the text, references added. Published in PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:28:09.412Z