Improved Method to extract Nucleon Helicity Distributions using Event Weighting

Abstract

An improved analysis method to extract quark helicity distributions in leading order (LO) QCD from semi-inclusive double spin asymmetries in deep inelastic scattering is presented. The method relies on the fact that fragmentation functions, describing the fragmentation of a quark into a hadron, have a strong dependence on the energy fraction $z$ of the observed hadron. Hadrons with large $z$ contain more information about the struck quark. This can be used in a weighting procedure to improve the figure of merit (= inverse of variance). In numerical examples it is shown that one could gain 15-39\% depending on the quark flavor and cut on $z$. Mathematically the problem can be described as finding an optimal solution in terms of the figure of merit for parameters $\boldsymbol \Theta$ determined from a system of linear equations ${\bf B}(x) {\boldsymbol \Theta} ={\bf Y}(x)$, where the measured input vector ${\bf Y}(x)$ is given as event distributions depending on a random variable $x$, the coefficients of the matrix ${\bf B}(x)$ depend as well on $x$, whereas the parameter vector $\boldsymbol\Theta$ to be determined does not.