Factorized approach to radiative corrections for inelastic lepton-hadron collisions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a factorized method for systematically including QED radiative corrections in deep-inelastic lepton-hadron scattering, improving the accuracy of hadron structure measurements at high-energy colliders.

Contribution

It develops a unified factorization framework that resums QED radiation effects into universal functions, enabling consistent analysis of both inclusive and semi-inclusive processes.

Findings

QED effects can cause up to 50% distortion in transverse momentum measurements.

The framework is applicable to current and future facilities like the Electron-Ion Collider.

Radiative corrections are essential for precise three-dimensional hadron structure extraction.

Abstract

We propose a factorized approach to QED radiative corrections for inclusive and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering to systematically account for QED and QCD radiation contributions to both processes on equal footing. This is achieved by utilizing factorization to resum logarithmically enhanced QED radiation into universal lepton distribution and fragmentation (or jet) functions. Numerical simulations suggest that the QED effects induced by the rotational distortion of the hadron transverse momentum, arising from the mismatch between the experimental Breit frame and the true photon-hadron frame, can be as large as 50\% for moderate $Q$, and become increasingly important for large transverse momenta. Our framework provides a uniform treatment of radiative effects for extracting three-dimensional hadron structure from high-energy lepton-hadron scattering at current and future facilities, such as the Electron-Ion Collider.