Lambda and Lambda-bar polarization in polarized DIS

Abstract

We consider the polarization of Lambda + Lambda-bar baryons produced in polarized Deep Inelastic Scattering at leading order, with various spin configurations: longitudinally polarized leptons and unpolarized nucleon; unpolarized leptons and longitudinally or transversely polarized nucleons; longitudinally polarized leptons and nucleons. We show how the different results in the different cases are related to different aspects of the elementary dynamics and to the spin properties of the distribution and fragmentation functions and show how a combined analysis might give useful information. We give numerical results according to several sets of polarized fragmentation functions recently proposed.