Accessing the nucleon transverse structure in inclusive deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

We revisit the standard analysis of inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering off nucleons taking into account the fact that on-shell quarks cannot be present in the final state, but they rather decay into hadrons - a process that can be described in terms of suitable "jet" correlators. As a consequence, a spin-flip term associated with the invariant mass of the produced hadrons is generated non perturbatively and couples to the target's transversity distribution function. In inclusive cross sections, this provides an hitherto neglected and large contribution to the twist-3 part of the g2 structure function, that can explain the discrepancy between recent calculations and fits of this quantity. It also provides an extension of the Burkhardt-Cottingham sum rule, putting constraints on the small-x behavior of the transversity function, as well as an extension of the Efremov-Teryaev-Leader sum rule, suggesting a novel way to measure the tensor charge of the proton.