Transverse polarization in deep inelastic collisions

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Abstract
An introduction to transverse polarization phenomena in deep inelastic processes is given. A transversely polarized state of a massive or massless particle is defined as a coherent superposition of different helicity states; for a quark, it corresponds to transverse spin; for a gluon, to linear polarization. A simple toy model shows that quarks could have a sizeable transverse polarization in a transversely polarized baryon. A transverse polarization asymmetry corresponds to the exchange of a parton‐antiparton pair of nonzero total helicity in the t‐channel of the unitarity diagram. Conservation of g‐channel helicity is used to select experiments which are sensitive to transverse polarization to leading order in α s and 1/Q. The transversely polarized quark and gluon densities have independent evolutions with Q 2.

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