
24. Report on future nuclear physics in Japan: Nucleon-structure physics
In the 21st century, world’s leading accelerator facilities such as J-PARC, KEKB, and
RIBF were completed in Japan. Together with RCNP and ELPH, it became possible to
investigate diverse aspects of hadron and nuclear physics. In addition, there was significant
progress on performance of super-computers. On the other hand, there are major accelera-
tor facilities in the world such as CERN-LHC, CERN-COMPASS, RHIC, Fermilab, JLab,
and GSI, and many Japanese scientists participate in these facility experiments. These ex-
perimental projects cover diverse fields of hadron and nuclear physics. Nuclear physicists
devote to their own projects and there is a tendency that they may not pay attention to
developments on other fields. In addition, more than 20 years had passed for the J-PARC
and RIBF since the early planning stage, so that physics projects of these facilities should
be re-examined. Therefore, by the proposal of the Japanese Nuclear Physics Executive
Committee, we wrote a report on plans on future nuclear physics projects in 2013 [28] and
showed possible direction of nuclear physics in Japan. This report covered a wide range
of hadron and nuclear physics on unstable nuclei, precision nuclear physics, strangeness
nuclear physics, low-energy hadron physics, high-energy heavy-ion physics, nucleon struc-
ture, fundamental physics with nuclei, and computational nuclear physics. The updated
version of this report was published in 2021 [8].
Within these reports in 2013 and 2021, S. Kumano contributed to the nucleon-structure
section. We explained proton-spin puzzle, QCD factorization and parton distribution
functions (PDFs), and lepton-proton and proton-proton scattering experiments and their
global analyses for determining polarized PDFs. Transverse spin physics and higher-
twist effects were also discussed. The proton-spin composition was shown in a color-
gauge invariant way. For finding the origin of nucleon spin, the contribution from par-
tonic orbital angular momenta should be determined by measuring three-dimensional
structure functions. Furthermore, theoretical hadron models and lattice QCD results
were summarized on the structure functions. Finally, we introduced future experimen-
tal projects, CERN-COMPASS, RHIC, Fermilab, KEKB, JLab, EIC, and J-PARC, on
nucleon-structure physics.
25. Numerical solution of Q
2
evolution equations for fragmentation functions
Semi-inclusive hadron-production processes are becoming important in high-energy hadron
reactions. They are used for investigating properties of quark-hadron matters in heavy-ion
collisions, for finding the origin of nucleon spin in polarized lepton-nucleon and nucleon-
nucleon reactions, and possibly for finding exotic hadrons. For describing the hadron-
production cross sections in high-energy reactions, fragmentation functions are essential
quantities. A fragmentation function indicates the probability of producing a hadron from
a parton in the leading order of the running coupling constant α
s
. In 2013, the Belle and
BaBar collaborations reported very precise experimental data on the fragmentation func-
tions, which were much more accurate than the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP)
and SLAC Large Detector (SLD). The LEP and SLD groups measured the fragmentation
functions at the Z-mass region, whereas the Belle and BaBar measurements were at 10.5
GeV. It means that the scaling violation (Q
2
evolution) phenomena became clear for the
first time by these data and it became possible to probe the gluon fragmentation functions.
The Q
2
dependence is described by the standard DGLAP (Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-
Altarelli-Parisi) evolution equations, which are often used in theoretical and experimental
analyses of the fragmentation functions and in calculating semi-inclusive cross sections.
16