Sivers Effect Asymmetries in Hadronic Collisions

Abstract

We argue that weighted azimuthal single spin asymmetries in back-to-back jet or pion production in polarized proton-proton scattering can be written as convolutions of universal distribution and fragmentation functions with gluonic pole cross sections as hard functions. Gluonic pole cross sections are gauge-invariant weighted sums of Feynman diagrams. The weight factors are a direct consequence of the (diagram-dependence of) gauge links. The best known consequence of the gauge links is the generation of the Sivers effect that is a source for single-spin asymmetries. Moreover, due to the dependence of the gauge links on the color-flow of the hard diagram the Sivers effect in SIDIS enters with opposite sign as it does in Drell-Yan scattering. The weight factors in the gluonic pole cross sections are the appropriate generalizations to more complicated processes of this relative sign difference. Furthermore, it is argued that the gluon-Sivers effect appears in twofold.