Spin Physics and Polarized Structure Functions

Abstract

A review on the theoretical aspects and the experimental results of polarized deep inelastic scattering and of other hard scattering processes is presented. The following items are discussed: longitudinally polarized structure functions, results from the SLAC and CERN polarization experiments, the QCD interpretation and the LO and NLO Q2-evolution of g1, the role of the polarized gluon density, the expectations for x-->0, sum rules, the first moment of the polarized structure function, the parametrizations of polarized parton densities, polarized jet, heavy quark and direct photon production, DIS semi-inclusive asymmetries and elastic neutrino-proton scattering, single and double spin asymmetries, structure functions for higher spin hadrons and nuclei, nonperturbative approaches, the transverse structure function g2, chiral-odd 'transversity' distributions.