Spacelike and timelike structure functions: a dispersive crossing relation

A bstract Crossing symmetry suggests that deep inelastic scattering and semi inclusive electron-positron annihilation are governed by analytic continuations of a single forward amplitude. Drell, Levy, and Yan proposed that the hadronic tensor admits analytic continuation and demonstrated, in reasonable models, that connected contributions to the cross-section continue. They also identified obstructions to continuation of the current correlator. In this work we supplement their observation with a new dispersive proposal for analytic continuation of the correlator and, assuming polynomial boundedness, derive subtracted dispersion relations relating spacelike and timelike cross sections. We introduce a new factorized function that quantifies the obstruction to crossing and compute its hard kernel at lowest order. The resulting identity connects distribution functions in deep inelastic scattering to fragmentation functions in annihilation.