Quark Flavor Separation inΛ-Baryon Fragmentation

Abstract

It is shown that unpolarized and polarized $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ and $\overline{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ production in neutrino and antineutrino deep inelastic scattering, can provide a clean separation of unpolarized and polarized fragmentation functions of a quark into a $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$, for both light-flavor quarks and antiquarks and also for strange quarks. Combining with $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ and $\overline{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ production in polarized electron deep inelastic scattering, one can systematically measure or check the various flavor and spin dependent fragmentation functions. Such measurements can provide crucial tests of different predictions concerning the spin structure of hadrons and the quark-antiquark asymmetry of the nucleon sea.