The spin-dependent cross sections for semi-inclusive lepton-nucleon scattering are derived in the framework of collinear factorization, including the effects of masses of the target and produced hadron at finite momentum transfer squared Q^2. At lead
ing order the cross sections factorize into products of parton distribution and fragmentation functions evaluated in terms of new, mass-dependent scaling variables. The size of the hadron mass corrections is estimated at kinematics relevant for future semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering experiments.
Parity-violating deep inelastic scattering (PVDIS) has been proposed as an important new tool to extract the flavor and isospin dependence of parton distributions in the nucleon. We discuss finite-Q^2 effects in PVDIS asymmetries arising from sublead
ing kinematical corrections and longitudinal contributions to the photon-Z interference. For the proton, these need to be accounted for in order to accurately extract the d/u ratio at large x; for the deuteron they are important to consider when searching for evidence of charge symmetry violation in parton distributions or signals for physics beyond the standard model. We further explore the dependence of PVDIS asymmetries for polarized targets on the u and d helicity distributions at large x.
We compute the nuclear corrections to the proton-deuteron Drell-Yan cross section for inclusive dilepton production, which, when combined with the proton-proton cross section, is used to determine the flavor asymmetry in the proton sea, dbar - ubar.
In addition to nuclear smearing corrections that are known to be important at large values of the nucleons parton momentum fraction x_N, we also consider dynamical off-shell nucleon corrections associated with the modifications of the bound nucleon structure inside the deuteron, which we find to be significant at intermediate and large x_N values. We also provide estimates of the nuclear corrections at kinematics corresponding to existing and planned Drell-Yan experiments at Fermilab and J-PARC which aim to determine the dbar/ubar ratio for x < 0.6.
We derive mass corrections for semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering of leptons from nucleons using a collinear factorization framework which incorporates the initial state mass of the target nucleon and the final state mass of the produced hadron
. The formalism is constructed specifically to ensure that physical kinematic thresholds for the semi-inclusive process are explicitly respected. A systematic study of the kinematic dependencies of the mass corrections to semi-inclusive cross sections reveals that these are even larger than for inclusive structure functions, especially at very small and very large hadron momentum fractions. The hadron mass corrections compete with the experimental uncertainties at kinematics typical of current facilities, and will be important to efforts at extracting parton distributions or fragmentation functions from semi-inclusive processes at intermediate energies.
