Soft gluon corrections to double transverse-spin asymmetries for small-$Q_T$ dilepton production at RHIC and J-PARC

Abstract

We calculate the double transverse-spin asymmetries, $\aqt$, in transversely polarized Drell-Yan process at the transverse-momentum $Q_T$ of the produced lepton pair. We perform all-order resummation of the logarithmically enhanced contributions in the relevant Drell-Yan cross sections at small $Q_T$, which are due to multiple soft gluon emission in QCD, up to the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. The asymmetries $\aqt$ to be observed in polarized experiments at RHIC and J-PARC are studied numerically as a function of $Q_T$. We show that the effects of the soft gluon resummation to the polarized and unpolarized cross sections largely cancel in $\aqt$, but the significant corrections still remain and are crucial for making a reliable QCD prediction of $\aqt$. In particular, the soft gluon corrections enhance $\aqt$ considerably in the small $Q_T$ region compared with the asymmetry in the fixed-order $\alpha_s$ perturbation theory. We also derive a novel asymptotic formula which embodies those remarkable features of $\aqt$ at small $Q_T$ in a compact analytic form and is useful to extract the transversity $\delta q(x)$ from the experimental data.