Single Transverse-Spin Asymmetry in Hadronic Dijet Production

Abstract

We study the single transverse-spin asymmetry for dijet production in hadronic collisions in both the collinear QCD factorization approach and the Brodsky-Hwang-Schmidt model. We show that a nonvanishing asymmetry is generated by both initial-state and final-state interactions, and that the final-state interactions dominate. We find that in the leading kinematic region where the transverse momentum imbalance of the two jets, q_\perp = P_{1\perp}+P_{2\perp}, is much less than the momentum of either jet, the contribution from the lowest non-trivial perturbative order to both the spin-averaged and the spin-dependent dijet cross sections can be factorized into a hard part that is a function only of the averaged jet momentum P_\perp = (P_{1\perp}-P_{2\perp})/2, and perturbatively generated transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distributions. We show that the spin asymmetry at this non-trivial perturbative order can be described by the TMD parton distributions defined in either semi-inclusive DIS or the Drell-Yan process. We derive the same hard parts from both the collinear factorization approach and in the context of the Brodsky-Hwang-Schmidt model, verifying that they are not sensitive to details of the factorized long distance physics.