Dihadron Transverse-Spin Asymmetries in Muon-Deuteron Deep-Inelastic Scattering

TL;DR

This paper reports on measurements of dihadron transverse-spin asymmetries in muon-deuteron deep-inelastic scattering, providing new insights into the quark transversity distributions and improving the precision of previous data, especially for the d-quark.

Contribution

It presents the first high-precision measurements of dihadron asymmetries in deuteron targets, advancing the understanding of nucleon transverse-spin structure.

Findings

Observation of a small nonzero asymmetry at large Bjorken-x.

Significantly improved determination of the d-quark transversity distribution.

Results are consistent with theoretical expectations.

Abstract

In 2022, the COMPASS collaboration performed semi-inclusive measurements of deep-inelastic muon-scattering on a transversely polarised deuteron (6LiD) target. From these data, transverse-spin-dependent dihadron asymmetries are extracted using pairs of oppositely charged hadrons. These asymmetries are directly sensitive to the quark transversity distributions and provide an independent handle on these fundamental quantities with respect to the Collins asymmetries measured in single-hadron production. The present results significantly improve upon the previous COMPASS deuteron measurements, which were the only available deuteron data worldwide, and reach a statistical precision comparable to that of the existing proton results from COMPASS. A small but nonzero asymmetry is observed at large Bjorken-x, consistent with theoretical expectations. A point-by-point extraction of the valence-quark transversity distributions yields, in particular, a substantially improved determination of the d-quark transversity. These measurements represent a major step towards a complete flavour mapping of the transverse-spin structure of the nucleon.