Polarized semi-inclusive electroweak structure functions at next-to-leading-order

TL;DR

This paper computes the next-to-leading order electroweak semi-inclusive DIS structure functions, highlighting significant NLO corrections at small x, which are vital for accurately extracting polarized parton distributions in future collider experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive NLO calculation of polarized and unpolarized electroweak SIDIS structure functions relevant for Electron-Ion-Collider phenomenology.

Findings

NLO corrections are large at small x.

Structure functions are sensitive to specific quark distributions.

Comparison shows differences from inclusive DIS and electromagnetic SIDIS.

Abstract

We present a next-to-leading order (NLO) computation of the full set of polarized and unpolarized electroweak semi-inclusive DIS (SIDIS) structure functions, whose knowledge is crucial for a precise extraction of polarized parton distributions. We focus on the phenomenology of the polarized structure functions for the kinematical conditions that could be reached in an Electron-Ion-Collider. We show that the NLO corrections are sizeable, particularly in the small-$x$ range. We test the sensitivity of these structure functions on certain quark distributions and compare it to the situation of inclusive DIS and electromagnetic SIDIS.