Soft-Fermion-Pole Mechanism to Single Spin Asymmetry in Hadronic Pion Production

Abstract

Single spin asymmetry (SSA) is a twist-3 observable in the collinear factorization approach. We present a twist-3 single-spin-dependent cross section formula for the pion production in pp-collision, p^\uparrow p\toπX, relevant to RHIC experiment. In particular, we calculate the soft-fermion-pole (SFP) contribution to the cross section from the quark-gluon correlation functions. We show that its effect can be as large as the soft-gluon-pole (SGP) contribution owing to the large SFP partonic hard cross section, even though the derivative of the SFP function does not participate in the cross section.

4 pages, 1 figure; to appear in the proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on Spin Physics (SPIN2008), October 6 - 11, 2008, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA