Helicity and Transversity Distribution of Nucleon and $\Lambda$-Hyperon from $\Lambda$ Fragmentation

Abstract

It is shown that $\Lambda$-hyperon fragmentation in charged lepton deep inelastic scattering (DIS) on a polarized nucleon target can provide sensitive information concerning the quark helicity and transversity distributions for both nucleon and $\Lambda$-hyperon at large $x$. Numerical predictions are given for the spin transfers of the produced $\Lambda$, when the target nucleon is polarized either longitudinally or transversely, and with the nucleon and $\Lambda$ quark distributions evaluated both in an SU(6) quark-spectator-diquark model and in a perturbative QCD (pQCD) based model. It is also shown that the predicted spin transfers have different behaviors for proton and neutron targets, and this can provide sensitive tests of different predictions for the quark helicity and transversity distributions of the $d$ valence quark of the proton at large $x$.