Sivers Asymmetry in the pion induced Drell-Yan process at COMPASS within TMD factorization

Abstract

We investigate the Sivers asymmetry in the pion-induced single polarized Drell-Yan process in the theoretical framework of the transverse momentum dependent factorization up to next-to-leading logarithmic order of QCD. Within the TMD evolution formalism of parton distribution functions, the recently extracted nonperturbative Sudakov form factor for the pion distribution functions as well as the one for the Sivers function of the proton are applied to numerically estimate the Sivers asymmetry in the $\pi^- p$ Drell-Yan at the kinematics of the COMPASS at CERN. In the low $b$ region, the Sivers function in $b$-space can be expressed as the convolution of the perturbatively calculable hard coefficients and the corresponding collinear correlation function, of which the Qiu-Sterman function is the most relevant one. The effect of the energy-scale dependence of the Qiu-Sterman function to the asymmetry is also studied. We find that our prediction on the Sivers asymmetries as functions of $x_p$, $x_\pi$, $x_F$ and $q_\perp$ is consistent with the recent COMPASS measurement.