Single transverse-spin asymmetries at large x

The large-x behavior of the transverse-momentum dependent quark distributions is analyzed in the factorization-inspired perturbative QCD framework, particularly for the naive time-reversal-odd quark Sivers function which is responsible for the single transverse-spin asymmetries in various semi-inclusive hard processes. By examining the dominant hard gluon exchange Feynman diagrams, and using the resulting power-counting rule, we find that the Sivers function has power behavior (1-x)⁴ at x→1, which is one power of (1-x) suppressed relative to the unpolarized quark distribution. These power-counting results provide important guidelines for the parameterization of quark distributions and quark-gluon correlations.