The Sivers asymmetry in hadronic dijet production

We study the single spin asymmetry in the back-to-back dijet production in transversely polarized proton-proton collisions. Such an asymmetry is generated by the Sivers functions in the incoming polarized proton. We propose a QCD formalism in terms of the transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions, which allow us to resum the large logarithms that arise in the perturbative calculations. We make predictions for the Sivers asymmetry of hadronic dijet production at the kinematic region that is relevant to the experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). We further compute the spin asymmetries in the selected positive and negative jet charge bins, to separate the contributions from u- and d-quark Sivers functions. We find that both the sign and size of our numerical results are roughly consistent with the preliminary results from the STAR collaboration at the RHIC.

Automated summary

The study focuses on the single spin asymmetry in back-to-back dijet production in transversely polarized proton-proton collisions, generated by Sivers functions in incoming polarized protons. A QCD formalism using transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions is proposed to resum large logarithms in perturbative calculations. Predictions are made for the Sivers asymmetry of hadronic dijet production at RHIC, with spin asymmetries computed in selected jet charge bins to separate contributions from u- and d-quark Sivers functions, showing rough consistency with preliminary results from the STAR collaboration.