Polarized neutral and charged current semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering at NNLO in QCD

A bstract The semi-inclusive production of identified hadrons in deeply inelastic lepton scattering on polarized nucleons allows to probe the spin structure of the nucleon target in a more detailed level than through fully inclusive processes. We compute the NNLO QCD corrections to longitudinally polarized semi-inclusive deep inelastic processes mediated by electroweak neutral and charged currents. We present the first calculation of polarized electroweak structure functions in the Larin scheme up to NNLO. Additionally, we reformulate the finite scheme transformation to the $$ \overline{\textrm{MS}} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mover> <mml:mi>MS</mml:mi> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> </mml:math> scheme in a quark flavour basis and identify issues in its assignment to partonic channels in previous calculations. Using our results we perform a detailed phenomenological study of polarized cross sections and of single and double spin asymmetries. We observe large electroweak effects, which need to be included in precision studies of polarized observables.