Azimuthal Asymmetries in Hadronic Final States at HERA

The distribution of hadrons produced in deeply inelastic electron-proton collisions depends on the azimuthal angle between lepton scattering plane and hadron production plane in the photon-proton centre-of-mass frame. In addition to the well known up-down asymmetry induced by the azimuthal dependence of the Born level subprocess, there is also a non-vanishing left-right asymmetry, provided the incoming electron is polarized. This asymmetry is time-reversal-odd and induced by absorptive corrections to the Born level process. We investigate the numerical magnitude of azimuthal asymmetries in semi-inclusive hadron production at HERA with particular emphasis on a possible determination of the time-reversal-odd asymmetry.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 7 figures included, The complete paper, including figures, is also available via anonymous ftp at ftp://ttpux2.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/ttp99/ttp99-29/ or via www at http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/Preprints

Hadron production from quark coalescence and jet fragmentation in intermediate energy collisions at RHIC

Transverse momentum spectra of pions, protons and antiprotons in Au+Au collisions at intermediate RHIC energy of $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=62$ GeV are studied in a model that includes both quark coalescence from the dense partonic matter and fragmentation of the quenched perturbative minijet partons. The resulting baryon to meson ratio at intermediate transverse momenta is predicted to be larger than that seen in experiments at higher center of mass energies.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Figures replaced to differentially address the high-pT behavior of baryon versus antibaryon to meson ratio

Azimuthal Spin Asymmetries in Semi-Inclusive Production from Positron-Proton Scattering

The recent measurements of azimuthal single spin asymmetries by the HERMES collaboration at DESY may shed some light on presently unknown fragmentation and distribution functions. We present a study of such functions and give some estimates of weighted integrals directly related to those measurements.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, comments added, figures changed, revised version to be published on Phys. Lett.

Inclusive B-Meson Production in e^+ e^- and p p-bar Collisions

We provide nonperturbative fragmentation functions for B mesons, both at leading and next-to-leading order in the MS-bar factorization scheme with five massless quark flavors. They are determined by fitting the fractional energy distribution of B mesons inclusively produced in e^+ e^- annihilation at CERN LEP1. Theoretical predictions for the inclusive production of B mesons with high transverse momenta in p p-bar scattering obtained with these fragmentation functions nicely agree, both in shape and normalization, with data recently taken at the Fermilab Tevatron.Comment: 20 pages (Latex), 6 figures (Postscript

Compatibility of various approaches to heavy-quark fragmentation

We find that the definition of the heavy-quark fragmentation function given by Jaffe and Randall differs by a factor of the longitudinal-momentum fraction z from the standard Collins-Soper definition. Once this factor is taken into account, the explicit calculation of Braaten et al. is found to be in agreement with the general analysis of Jaffe and Randall. We also examine the model of Peterson et al. for heavy-quark fragmentation and find that the quoted values of the width and of the value of $z$ at the maximum are in error. The corrected values are in agreement with the analysis of Jaffe and Randall.Comment: 4 pages late

Phenomenology of single spin asymmetries in p(transv. polarized)-p -> pion + X

A phenomenological description of single transverse spin effects in hadron-hadron inclusive processes is proposed, assuming a generalized factorization scheme and pQCD hard interactions. The transverse momentum, k_T, of the quarks inside the hadrons and of the hadrons relatively to the fragmenting quark, is taken into account in distribution and fragmentation functions, and leads to possible non zero single spin asymmetries. The role of k_T and spin dependent quark fragmentations -- the so-called Collins effect -- is investigated in details in p(transv. polarized)-p -> pion + X processes: it is shown how the experimental data could be described, obtaining an explicit expression for the spin asymmetry of a polarized fragmenting quark, on which some comments are made. Predictions for other processes, possible further applications and experimental tests are discussed.Comment: 20+1 pages, LaTeX, 6 eps figures, uses epsfig.sty. Version v2: Some sentences rephrased and comments added throughout the paper; one reference added; no changes in results and figures. Final version to be published in Phys. Rev.

INCLUSIVE PARTICLE PRODUCTION IN \pbp COLLISIONS

We calculate the inclusive production of charged hadrons in \pbp collisions to next-to-leading order (NLO) in the QCD improved parton model using a new set of NLO fragmentation functions for charged pions and kaons. We predict transverse-momentum distributions and compare them with experimental data from the CERN S\pbpS Collider and the Fermilab Tevatron.Comment: the file containing the figures has been replaced: we correct a mistake in the uuencoding procedure and we give the real Fig 4 instead of the spurious one which was accidentally included in the previous file. the text is unchanged

Heavy Flavour Production in Two-Photon Collisions

We review the production of charm and bottom quarks in two-photon collisions at e+e- colliders. The next-to-leading order QCD predictions for total cross sections and differential distributions are compared with recent experimental results.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at the UK Phenomenology Workshop on Collider Physics, Durham, England, 19-24 Sep 199

Next-to-Leading Order Analysis of Inclusive and Semi-inclusive Polarized Data

We present a combined next-to-leading order QCD analysis to data on both inclusive and semi-inclusive polarized deep inelastic scattering asymmetries. Performing NLO QCD global fits with different sets of observables, we evaluate the impact of the very recent semi-inclusive results presented by SMC in the extraction of NLO polarized parton distributions.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures include