Abstract

We show that measurements of single-spin asymmetries (SSAs) in charged current weak interaction processes such as deep inelastic neutrino scattering on a polarized target and inclusive W production in polarized hadron-hadron collisions discriminate between the two fundamental QCD mechanisms (the Sivers and Collins effects) which have been proposed to explain such time-reversal-odd asymmetries. It has recently been shown that QCD final-state interactions due to gluon exchange between the struck quark and the proton spectators in semi-inclusive deep inelastic lepton scattering will produce non-zero Sivers-type single-spin asymmetries which survive in the Bjorken limit. We show that this QCD final-state interaction produces identical SSAs in charged and neutral current reactions. Furthermore, the contribution of each quark to the SSA from this mechanism is proportional to the contribution of that quark to the polarized baryon's anomalous magnetic moment. In contrast, the Collins effect contribution to SSAs depends on the transversity distribution of quarks in the polarized target. Since the charged current only couples to quarks of one chirality, it cannot sense the transversity distribution of the target, and thus it gives no Collins-type contribution to single-spin correlations. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.