# Semi-inclusive pion electroproduction at the highest transverse momenta

## TL;DR

This paper investigates high transverse momentum semi-inclusive pion electroproduction at current and future electron accelerators, highlighting its potential to reveal insights into parton distributions and QCD processes beyond leading twist.

## Contribution

It introduces the study of a higher twist, perturbatively calculable process for pion production, distinct from the leading twist fragmentation, and explores its implications for parton distributions and GPDs.

## Key findings

- Identification of a higher twist process for pion production
- Potential to extract parton distribution functions from semi-inclusive data
- Connection between semi-inclusive and exclusive meson electroproduction

## Abstract

At the energies of present and future electron accelerators designed to study the structure of hadrons, there is a regime where hard pion electroproduction proceeds by a perturbatively calculable process in QCD. The process is not the leading twist fragmentation one but rather a higher twist process that produces kinematically isolated pions. Semi-inclusive data may teach us more about parton distribution functions of the target and the pion distribution amplitude. In addition, there is a connection to generalized parton distribution calculations of exclusive electroproduction of mesons in that the perturbative kernel is the same.