arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jacques Soffer.
During the five days of this workshop we had forty five hours of lectures, so a tremendous amount of new information was delivered. I will be able only to highlight some aspects of the numerous interesting topics, which were discussed, leaving out many of them.
Our knowledge of the nucleon spin structure has greatly improved over the last twenty years or so, but still many fundamental questions remain unsolved. I will try to review some of the puzzling aspects of the structure of the nucleon spin, in particular, what is known, what remains to be discovered and the prospects for the near future. I will also focus on some current activities in QCD spin physics.
In the framework of the impact picture we compute the analyzing power $A_N$ for $pp$ elastic scattering at high energy and in the very forward direction. We consider the full set of Coulomb amplitudes and show that the interference between the hadronic non-flip amplitude and the single-flip Coulomb amplitude is sufficient to obtain a good agreement with the present experimental data. This leads us to conclude that the single-flip hadronic amplitude is small in this low momentum transfer region and it strongly suggests that this process can be used as an absolute polarimeter at the BNL-RHIC $pp$ collider.
We extend to the strange quarks and antiquarks, the statistical approach of parton distributions and we calculate the strange quark asymmetry $s-\bar s$. We find that the asymmetry is small, positive in the low $x$ region and negative in the high $x$ region. In this framework, the polarized strange quarks and antiquarks distributions, which are obtained simultaneously, are found to be both negative for all $x$ values.
Positivity constraints have proved to be important for spin observables of exclusive reactions involving polarized initial and final particles. Attention is focused in this note on the photoproduction of pseudoscalar mesons from spin 1/2 baryons, more specifically gamma+ N -> K+ Lambda, gamma+ N -> K Sigma, for which new experimental data are becoming available.
We recall how parton distributions are constructed in a statistical physical picture of the nucleon. The chiral properties of QCD lead to strong relations between quarks and antiquarks distributions and the importance of the Pauli exclusion principle is also emphasized. A global next-to-leading order QCD analysis of unpolarized and polarized deep-inelastic scattering data allows to determine a small number of free parameters. Some predictions are compared to recent experimental results and we discuss the prospects of this physical framework.
We propose a novel mechanism for exclusive diffractive Higgs production $pp \to p H p $ in which the Higgs boson carries a significant fraction of the projectile proton momentum. This mechanism will provide a clear experimental signal for Higgs production due to the small background in this kinematic region. The key assumption underlying our analysis is the presence of intrinsic heavy flavor components of the proton bound state, whose existence at high light-cone momentum fraction $x$ has growing experimental and theoretical support. We also discuss the implications of this picture for exclusive diffractive quarkonium and other channels.
By extending the statistical distributions to the transverse degree of freedhom, we account for a multiplicative factor in the Fermi-Dirac functions of the light quarks, we were led to introduce in a previous work to comply with experiment. We can also get light antiquark distributions, similar to those we proposed earlier
We propose a novel mechanism for exclusive diffractive Higgs production $pp \to Hpp$, in which the Higgs carries a significant fraction of the projectile proton's momentum. This mechanism will then provide a clear experimental signal for Higgs production, due to the small background in this kinematic region. The key assumption underlying our analysis is the presence of intrinsic charm (IC) and intrinsic bottom (IB) fluctuations in the proton bound state, whose existence, at high light-cone momentum fraction $x$, has a substantial and growing experimental and theoretical support.
New experimental results on polarized structure functions, cross sections for $e^{\pm}p$ neutral and charge current reactions and $ν$ ($\barν$) charge current on isoscalar targets are compared with predictions using the statistical parton distributions, which were previously determined. New data on cross sections for Drell-Yan processes, single jet in $p\bar{p}$ collisions and inclusive $π^0$ production in $pp$ collisions are also compared with predictions from this theoretical approach. The good agreement which we find with all these tests against experiment, strenghtens our opinion on the relevance of the role of quantum statistics for parton distributions. We will also discuss the prospects of this physical framework.
Transverse single-spin asymmetries (SSA) in inclusive reactions are now considered to be directly related to the transverse momentum ${\bf k}_{T}$ of the fundamental partons involved in the process. We find that the ideal probe to extract information on the gluon Sivers function is the transverse SSA of prompt photon production $p p^{\uparrow} \to γX$, at large $p_T$. The following related processes, $p p^{\uparrow} \to γ+ jet + X$, $p p^{\uparrow} \to γ^* + X \to μ^+ μ^- + X$ and $\bar{p} p^{\uparrow} \to γ+ X$ are also briefly discussed.
We extend the earlier suggested QCD-motivated model for the $Q^2$-dependence of the generalized Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn (GDH) sum rule which assumes the smooth dependence of the structure function $g_T$, while the sharp dependence is due to the $g_2$ contribution and is described by the elastic part of the Burkhardt-Cottingham sum rule. The model successfully predicts the low crossing point for the proton GDH integral, but is at variance with the recent very accurate JLAB data. We show that, at this level of accuracy, one should include the previously neglected radiative and power QCD corrections, as boundary values for the model. We stress that the GDH integral, when measured with such a high accuracy achieved by the recent JLAB data, is very sensitive to QCD power corrections. We estimate the value of these power corrections from the JLAB data at $Q^2 \sim 1 {GeV}^2$. The inclusion of all QCD corrections leads to a good description of proton, neutron and deuteron data at all $Q^2$.
The cross section data for $π^0$ inclusive production in $pp$ collisions is considered in a rather broad kinematic region in energy $\sqrt{s}$, Feynman variable $x_F$ and transverse momentum $p_T$. The analysis of these data is done in the perturbative QCD framework at the next-to-leading order. We find that they cannot be correctly described in the entire kinematic domain and this leads us to conclude that the single-spin asymmetry, $A_N$ for this process, observed several years ago at FNAL by the experiment E704 and the recent result obtained at BNL-RHIC by STAR, are two different phenomena. This suggests that STAR data probes a genuine leading-twist QCD single-spin asymmetry for the first time and finds a large effect.
We consider the spin polarization of leptons produced in neutrino and antineutrino nucleon deep inelastic scattering, via charged currents, and we study the positivity constraints on the spin components in a model independent way. These results are very important, in particular in the case of $τ^{\pm}$ leptons, because the polarization information is crucial in all future neutrino oscillation experiments.
Parton distributions are constructed in a statistical physical picture of the nucleon. The chiral properties of QCD lead to strong relations between quarks and antiquarks distributions and the importance of the Pauli exclusion principle is also emphasized. A global next-to-leading order QCD analysis of unpolarized and polarized deep-inelastic scattering data is performed to determine a small number of free parameters. Some predictions are compared to recent experimental results. We also present an extension of the statistical approach to the description of baryon fragmentation functions.
We will give convincing arguments to view transverse spin asymmetries in inclusive reactions, as very exciting observables, although there were considered as irrelevant for a long time. We look forward to new high energy data in the near future.
For any inclusive reaction of the type $A_1({spin} 1/2)+ A_2({spin} 1/2) \to B + X$, we derive new positivity constraints on spin observables and study their implications for theoretical models in view, in particular, of accounting for future data from the polarized $pp$ collider at BNL-RHIC. We find that the single transverse spin asymmetry $A_N$ for several processes, in the central region for example jet production, direct photon production, lepton-pair production, must be such that $|A_N| \lappeq 1/2$, rather than the usual bound $|A_N| \leq 1$.
A statistical model for the parton distributions in the nucleon has proven its efficiency in the analysis of deep inelastic scattering data, so we propose to extend this approach to the description of unpolarized fragmentation functions for the octet baryons. The characteristics of the model are determined by using some data on the inclusive production of proton and $Λ$ in unpolarized deep inelastic scattering and a next-to-leading analysis of the available experimental data on the production of unpolarized octet baryons in $e^+e^-$ annihilation. Our results show that both parton distributions and fragmentation functions are compatible with the statistical approach, in terms of a few free parameters, whose interpretation will be discussed.