# 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.

## Key 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.