Probing the transverse spin of quarks in deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

To identify some way to measure the quark transversity, this thesis analyzes one-particle and two-particle inclusive deep inelastic scattering, where one and two of the outgoing hadrons are detected in coincidence with the electron. It is shown that transversity can be measured in the above processes, in connection with three different fragmentation functions: the first one requires the observation of an unpolarized final state hadron with transverse momentum (Collins function), the second requires the observation of the interference between the s- and p-wave production of two hadrons, the third requires the observation of pure p-wave two-hadron production, or equivalently of a spin-one resonance. All these fragmentation functions fall in the category of T-odd fragmentation functions: they require the presence of final state interactions, or else they are forbidden by time-reversal invariance. The last part of the thesis looks at the possibility of modeling this kind of fragmentation functions and investigates whether they can be large enough to allow the extraction of transversity.