Colour Modification of Effective T-odd Distributions

Abstract

We show that soft-gluon twist-3 contributions to single-spin asymmetries (SSA) in hard processes may be expressed in the form of effective T-odd Sivers distributions, whose signs and scales are modified by process-dependent colour factors. We thus prove that the Sivers mechanism may also be applied at large transverse momenta. We stress that twist-3 SSA in semi-inclusive deeply inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan processes are suppressed by transverse momentum rather than a virtual-photon momentum transfer and thus naively correspond to twist two at the hadronic level. More rigorously, the transverse-momentum weighted averages of the Sivers function correspond to increasing twist (3, 5, 7, ...) while the full kT-dependent Sivers function (just as other transverse-momentum dependent distribution and fragmentation functions) corresponds to a resummed infinite tower of higher twists.