Soft gluon resummation in Drell-Yan dilepton production at small transverse momentum: spin asymmetry and a novel asymptotic formula

Abstract

We discuss the double-spin asymmetry \aqt in the transversely polarized Drell-Yan process at small transverse-momentum Q_T of the produced dilepton. The soft gluon corrections relevant for small Q_T are resummed to all orders in \alpha_s, up to the next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We show that the soft gluon corrections largely cancel in the spin asymmetry, but the significant corrections still remain.The asymmetries \aqt are calculated for pp collision at RHIC and J-PARC, and for p\bar{p} collision at GSI. A novel asymptotic formula for \aqt at small Q_T is presented, which provides a new approach to extract the transversity \delta q(x) from the experimental data.