MEASURING THE TRANSVERSE POLARIZATION OF QUARKS IN THE PROTON

The transverse spin polarization distribution of quarks in a proton contributes at leading twist to the angular distribution of lepton pair production in doubly polarized proton-proton collisions. Although this distribution is straightforward to define in the QCD-improved parton model and represents a fundamental quark degree of freedom, it has never been measured. Moreover, deeply inelastic electroproduction experiments are only sensitive to this distribution at the higher twist level, and then mix this contribution with others, including the one coming from multiparton initial states. Reviewing this, we conclude that the Drell-Yan process is the best way to measure the quark transverse spin polarization distribution.