Hermes and the spin of the proton

HERMES is a second generation experiment to study the spin structure of the nucleon, in which measurements of the spin dependent properties of semi-inclusive deep-inelastic lepton scattering are emphasized. Data have been accumulated for semi-inclusive pion, kaon, and proton double-spin asymmetries, as well as for high-p_T hadron pairs, and single-spin azimuthal asymmetries for pion electroproduction and deep virtual Compton scattering. These results provide information on the flavor decomposition of the polarized quark distributions in the nucleon and a first glimpse of the gluon polarization, while the observation of the azimuthal asymmetries show promise for probing the tensor spin of the nucleon and isolating the total angular momentum carried by the quarks.Comment: LaTeX, 21 page

Novel Transversity Properties in Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering

The $T$-odd distribution functions contributing to transversity properties of the nucleon and their role in fueling nontrivial contributions to azimuthal asymmetries in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering are investigated. We use a dynamical model to evaluate these quantities in terms of HERMES kinematics.Comment: 5 pages revtex; 5 eps figures. References added. To appear as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review

Chiral Odd Structure Functions from a Chiral Soliton

We calculate the chiral odd quark distributions and the corresponding structure functions $h_T(x,Q^2)$ and $h_L(x,Q^2)$ within the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio chiral soliton model for the nucleon. The $Q^2$ evolution of the twist-2 contributions is performed according to the standard GLAP formalism while the twist-three piece, $\bar{h}_L(x)$, is evolved according to the large $N_C$ scheme. We carry out a comparison between the chiral odd structure functions of the proton and the neutron. At the low model scale ($Q_0^2$) we find that the leading twist effective quark distributions,$f_1^{(q)}(x,Q_0^2)$, $g_1^{(q)}(x,Q_0^2)$ and $h_T^{(q)}(x,Q_0^2)$ satisfy Soffer's inequality for both quark flavors $q=u,d$.Comment: 36 pages, 10 postscript figures, discussion on numerical results extended, to be published in Phys. Rev.