Master formula for twist-3 soft-gluon-pole mechanism to single transverse-spin asymmetry

Perturbative QCD relates the single transverse-spin asymmetries (SSAs) for hard processes at large transverse-momentum of produced particle to partonic matrix elements that describe interference between scattering from a coherent quark-gluon pair and from a single quark, generated through twist-3 quark-gluon correlations inside a hadron. When the coherent gluon is soft at the gluonic poles, its coupling to partonic subprocess can be systematically disentangled, so that the relevant interfering amplitude can be derived entirely from the Born diagrams for the scattering from a single quark. We establish a new formula that represents the exact rules to derive the SSA due to soft-gluon poles from the knowledge of the twist-2 cross-section formula for unpolarized processes. This single master formula is applicable to a range of processes like Drell-Yan and direct-photon production, and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering, and is also useful to manifest the gauge invariance of the results. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.