Kaon Boer–Mulders function using a contact interaction

Abstract Using a symmetry preserving treatment of a vector $$\otimes $$ ⊗ vector contact interaction (SCI), results are delivered for the four kaon transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions (TMDs), viz . helicity-independent (HI) and Boer–Mulders (BM) TMDs for the kaon’s u , s valence degrees of freedom. In completing this analysis, we are able to deliver insights into, amongst other things, the role played by emergent hadron mass (EHM) phenomena in producing these TMDs; the EHM modulating effect of the Higgs-boson coupling that produces the strange quark current mass; the impact of gauge link models on whether predictions satisfy the positivity constraint that bounds the BM function relative to the HI TMD; and the size of the BM shift and effects thereupon of off-diagonal terms in the associated scale-evolution kernel.