Probing Relativistic Spin Effects in the Nucleon by Means of Drell-Yan Processes

Abstract

Significant differences between transverse and longitudinal polarized parton distributions are found at low energies within a light-front covariant quark model of the nucleon. These differences are due to relativistic spin effects introduced by the Melosh rotations and survive evolution to higher $Q^2$ scales. A specific observable related to double-spin asymmetries in lepton pair production in polarized hadron-hadron collisions is defined. The possibility of assessing the relevance of these relativistic spin effects in future experiments at RHIC and HERA--$\vec{N}$ is discussed.

15 pages, 5 figures. Expanded version: additional results, analysis of expected experimental errorbars and kinematics of HERA-N added

References in corpus (7)

• Explicitly Covariant Light-Front Dynamics and Relativistic Few-Body Systems
• Measurement of the Proton and Deuteron Spin Structure Functions g2 and Asymmetry A2
• Polarized Parton Distributiions and Light-Front Dynamics
• Numerical solution of Q^2 evolution equation for the transversity distribution Delta_T q
• Transverse Double-Spin Asymmetries for Muon Pair Production in pp-Collisions
• Relativistic Spin-Flavor States in Light Front Dynamics
• Spin Physics with the PHENIX Detector System

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Chiral-odd generalized parton distributions in constituent quark models
• Correlations in Double Parton Distributions: Perturbative and Non-Perturbative effects
• Relativity and constituent quark structure in model calculations of parton distributions