Dihadron fragmentation functions and their relevance for transverse spin studies

TL;DR

This paper reviews dihadron fragmentation functions, focusing on interference functions that reveal the transverse spin structure of quarks, and discusses recent developments and their importance in understanding nucleon transversity.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent studies on dihadron fragmentation functions and highlights their role in probing the nucleon's transverse spin distributions.

Findings

Interference fragmentation functions encode azimuthal asymmetries.

They serve as tools to access the quark transversity distribution.

Recent experimental and theoretical insights are summarized.

Abstract

Dihadron fragmentation functions describe the probability that a quark fragments into two hadrons plus other undetected hadrons. In particular, the so-called interference fragmentation functions describe the azimuthal asymmetry of the dihadron distribution when the quark is transversely polarized. They can be used as tools to probe the quark transversity distribution in the nucleon. Recent studies on unpolarized and polarized dihadron fragmentation functions are presented, and we discuss their role in giving insights into transverse spin distributions.