Unveiling the nucleon tensor charge at Jefferson Lab: A study of the SoLID case

TL;DR

This paper assesses how future Jefferson Lab SoLID experiments will significantly improve the precision of quark transversity distributions and nucleon tensor charge measurements, enhancing our understanding of nucleon structure.

Contribution

It introduces a Hessian matrix-based method to estimate uncertainties in transversity distributions from future experimental data, demonstrating potential precision improvements.

Findings

SoLID data can improve u- and d-quark transversity precision by up to tenfold.

The study provides a strategy for uncertainty estimation in transversity extraction.

Future measurements will better constrain the nucleon tensor charge.

Abstract

Future experiments at the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV upgrade, in particular, the Solenoidal Large Intensity Device (SoLID), aim at a very precise data set in the region where the partonic structure of the nucleon is dominated by the valence quarks. One of the main goals is to constrain the quark transversity distributions. We apply recent theoretical advances of the global QCD extraction of the transversity distributions to study the impact of future experimental data from the SoLID experiments. Especially, we develop a simple strategy based on the Hessian matrix analysis that allows one to estimate the uncertainties of the transversity quark distributions and their tensor charges extracted from SoLID data simulation. We find that the SoLID measurements with the proton and the effective neutron targets can improve the precision of the u- and d-quark transversity distributions up to one order of magnitude in the range 0.05 < x < 0.6.