Speaker
Description
The transversity distribution was extracted for the first time from data on the transverse momentum distribution of single hadrons produced in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering. The transversity was recently extracted also from the same process but leading to the inclusive production of hadron pairs in the final state. The latter analysis can be conveniently performed in the framework of collinear factorization where the elementary mechanism is represented as the simple product of transversity and of a suitable chiral-odd function describing the fragmentation of a transversely polarized parton into a pair of hadrons inside the same current jet. The same elementary mechanism was predicted long ago to generate an asymmetry in the azimuthal distribution of the hadron pairs when they are produced in proton-proton collisions with one transversely polarized proton. Recently, the STAR Collaboration has observed this asymmetry. We analyze the impact of these data on our knowledge of transversity.
