Hadron mass corrections in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering

TL;DR

This paper develops a collinear factorization approach to include hadron mass corrections in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering, revealing significant effects at certain kinematic regions relevant for current experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism that explicitly respects physical thresholds and systematically studies the impact of hadron mass corrections on semi-inclusive cross sections.

Findings

Mass corrections are larger than in inclusive structure functions.

Corrections are significant at small and large hadron momentum fractions.

Mass effects are comparable to experimental uncertainties at current facility energies.

Abstract

We derive mass corrections for semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering of leptons from nucleons using a collinear factorization framework which incorporates the initial state mass of the target nucleon and the final state mass of the produced hadron. The formalism is constructed specifically to ensure that physical kinematic thresholds for the semi-inclusive process are explicitly respected. A systematic study of the kinematic dependencies of the mass corrections to semi-inclusive cross sections reveals that these are even larger than for inclusive structure functions, especially at very small and very large hadron momentum fractions. The hadron mass corrections compete with the experimental uncertainties at kinematics typical of current facilities, and will be important to efforts at extracting parton distributions or fragmentation functions from semi-inclusive processes at intermediate energies.