Accessing the nucleon transverse structure in inclusive deep inelastic scattering

We revisit the standard analysis of inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering off nucleons taking into account the fact that on-shell quarks cannot be present in the final state, but they rather decay into hadrons - a process that can be described in terms of suitable "jet" correlators. As a consequence, a spin-flip term associated with the invariant mass of the produced hadrons is generated non perturbatively and couples to the target's transversity distribution function. In inclusive cross sections, this provides an hitherto neglected and large contribution to the twist-3 part of the g2 structure function, that can explain the discrepancy between recent calculations and fits of this quantity. It also provides an extension of the Burkhardt-Cottingham sum rule, putting constraints on the small-x behavior of the transversity function, as well as an extension of the Efremov-Teryaev-Leader sum rule, suggesting a novel way to measure the tensor charge of the proton.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Extended discussion on small-x transversity asymptotics. References adde

Hadronization in cold nuclear matter

I review a recently proposed scaling analysis of hadron suppression in Deeply Inelastic Scattering on nuclear targets measured at the HERMES experiment. The analysis can distinguish 2 competing explanations for the observed suppression, namely, quark radiative energy loss with long hadron formation times, and prehadron nuclear absorption with hadronization starting inside the nucleus. Experimental data are shown to favor short formation times and prehadron absorption.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, uses elsart.cls. Talk given at "Hard Probes 2006", Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, CA (USA), June 9-16, 200

Nuclear modifications of fragmentation functions and rescaling models

We discuss nuclear modification of fragmentation functions in the context of the so-called ``rescaling models''. These models implement partial deconfinement inside nuclei by modifying the fragmentation functions perturbatively. We apply these models to the analysis of nuclear hadron production in deep inelastic scattering processes at the HERMES and EMC experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, uses espcrc1.sty. Talk presented at "QCD-N'02", Ferrara (ITA), April 3rd-6th, 200

Collinear factorization for deep inelastic scattering structure functions at large Bjorken xB

We examine the uncertainty of perturbative QCD factorization for hadron structure functions in deep inelastic scattering at a large value of the Bjorken variable xB. We analyze the target mass correction to the structure functions by using the collinear factorization approach in the momentum space. We express the long distance physics of structure functions and the leading target mass corrections in terms of parton distribution functions with the standard operator definition. We compare our result with existing work on the target mass correction. We also discuss the impact of a final-state jet function on the extraction of parton distributions at large fractional momentum x.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures; discussion on baryon number conservation clarifie