Nucleon Transversity Distribution from Azimuthal Spin Asymmetry in Pion Electroproduction

The azimuthal asymmetry observed by the HERMES collaboration in semi-inclusive pion production in deep inelastic scattering of unpolarized positron on the longitudinally polarized proton target, can provide information of the quark transversity distributions of the nucleon. We show that the quark transversity distributions predicted both by the light-cone quark-spectator-diquark model and by a pQCD inspired model can give consistent descriptions of the available HERMES data for the analyzing powers $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ and $A_{UL}^{\sin 2 \phi}$ for $\pi^+$ and $\pi^-$ productions. We also show that the two models give similar predictions of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^+$ production, whereas they give very different predictions of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^-$ production at large $x$. Further precision measurement of $A_{UL}^{\sin \phi}$ for $\pi^-$ production can provide a decisive test of different models.