New way to access the quark fragmentation functions in electron-positron annihilation

Abstract

The description of the polarized quark hadronization process is one of the most challenging problems in the physics of strong interactions. The various single hadron and dihadron fragmentation functions, that quantify this process, are determined by analyzing the inclusive production of hadrons in electron-positron semi-inclusive annihilation process (SIA). These, in turn, are used to extract the transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions from the experiments on semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering process (SIDIS), elucidating the spin-orbit correlations in nucleon. Here we present a framework for new measurements of polarized quark fragmentation functions in electron-positron annihilation and deep inelastic semi-inclusive processes. These measurements offer a number of exciting opportunities to improve our understanding of the polarized quark hadronization and test the universality of the fragmentation functions. Such measurements can be performed at the upcoming BELLE-II, JLab-12 and the future EIC experiments.