High Energy Hadronic Helicity Violation: What Helicity Flip Form Factors Measure

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum is crucial for the description of several process at large momentum transfer in the impulse approximation in perturbative QCD. We review the mechanism of independent scattering which makes violation of the helicity conservation rule possible at leading order - and without any need to flip a quark helicity - in exclusive hadron-hadron reactions. We argue that helicity flip form factors, which violate the factorization assumptions of conventional approaches and are classified as ``higher-twist," are nevertheless calculable to leading order in perturbative QCD when information on non-zero orbital angular momentum is incorporated.