Left-right asymmetry for pion and kaon production in the semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering process

TL;DR

This paper investigates the left-right asymmetry in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering, emphasizing the role of the Sivers effect and analyzing pion and kaon production across various experimental setups.

Contribution

It provides a new analysis of left-right asymmetry without weighting functions, highlighting the sensitivity to Sivers and fragmentation functions and extending calculations to kaon production.

Findings

Results are sensitive to the Sivers and fragmentation function parametrizations.

Analysis covers multiple experimental kinematics including HERMES, COMPASS, and JLab.

Extends understanding of sea quark Sivers distributions and unfavored fragmentation processes.

Abstract

We analyze the left-right asymmetry in the semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS) process without introducing any weighting functions. With the current theoretical understanding, we find that the Sivers effect plays a key role in our analysis. We use the latest parametrization of the Sivers and fragmentation functions to reanalyze the $\pi^\pm$ production process and find that the results are sensitive to the parametrization. We also extend our calculation on the $K^{\pm}$ production, which can help us know more about the Sivers distribution of the sea quarks and the unfavored fragmentation processes. HERMES kinematics with a proton target, COMPASS kinematics with a proton, deuteron, and neutron target (the information on the neutron target can be effectively extracted from the $^3$He target), and JLab kinematics (both 6 GeV and 12 GeV) with a proton and neutron target are considered in our paper.