Signals of strong parity violation in deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

We include strong parity-violating contributions to inclusive deep inelastic scattering (DIS) of longitudinally polarized leptons off an unpolarized target. At variance with standard results, we obtain nonvanishing parity-violating structure functions in the case of pure photon exchange. The addition of these strong parity-violating contributions improves the description of existing experimental data on DIS parity-violating asymmetries. We find the size of these contributions small but exhibiting a deviation from zero of about 1.5 σ. The associated p-value is 0.063, indicating that the probability of making an error by rejecting the hypothesis of no parity-violating contributions is 6.3%, which is small but not negligible. Further improvement on the limit of the strong parity-violation can be expected from the future SoLID program at Jefferson Lab.