Double transverse spin asymmetries in vector boson production

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  • 24 April 2000
Abstract
We investigate a helicity non-flip double transverse spin asymmetry in vector boson production in hadron-hadron scattering, which was first considered by Ralston and Soper. It does not involve transversity functions and in principle also arises in W-boson production for which we present the expressions. The asymmetry requires observing the transverse momentum of the vector boson, but it is not suppressed by explicit inverse powers of a large energy scale. However, as we will show, inclusion of Sudakov factors suppresses the asymmetry approximately as a single inverse power. Moreover, the asymmetry is shown to be approximately proportional to x_1 g_1(x_1) x_2 \bar g_1(x_2), which gives rise to additional suppression at small values of the lightcone momentum fractions. This implies that it is negligible for Z or W production and is mainly of interest for \gamma^* at low energies. We also compare the asymmetry with other types of double transverse spin asymmetries and discuss how to disentangle them.

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