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Semi-inclusive pion electroproduction at the highest transverse momenta

Andrei Afanasev1 and Carl E. Carlson2

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 093008 – Published 26 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ms5l-p89c

Abstract

At the energies of present and future electron accelerators designed to study the structure of hadrons, there is a regime where hard pion electroproduction proceeds by a perturbatively calculable process in QCD. The process is not the leading twist fragmentation one but rather a higher-twist process that produces kinematically isolated pions. Semi-inclusive data may teach us more about parton distribution functions of the target and the pion distribution amplitude. In addition, there is a connection to generalized parton distribution calculations of exclusive electroproduction of mesons in that the perturbative kernel is the same.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 093008– Published 26 November, 2025
  • Received 29 August 2025
  • Accepted 11 November 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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