Soft-Gluon-Pole Contribution in Single Transverse-Spin Asymmetries of Drell-Yan Processes

Abstract

We use multi-parton states to examine the leading order collinear factorization of single transverse-spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes. Twist-3 operators are involved in the factorization. We find that the so-called soft-gluon-pole contribution in the factorization must exist in order to make the factorization correct. This contribution comes from the corresponding cross-section at one-loop, while the hard-pole contribution in the factorization comes from the cross-section at tree-level. Although the two contributions come from results at different orders, their perturbative coefficient functions in the factorization are at the same order. This is in contrast to factorizations only involving twist-2 operators. The soft-gluon-pole contribution found in this work is in agreement with that derived in a different way. For the hard-pole contributions we find an extra contribution from an extra parton process contributing to the asymmetries. We also solve a part of discrepancy in evolutions of the twist-3 operator. The method presented here for analyzing the factorization can be generalized to other processes and can be easily used for studying factorizations at higher orders, because the involved calculations are of standard scattering amplitudes.