Target Mass Effects in Parton Quasi-Distributions

We study the impact of non-zero (and apparently large) value of the nucleon mass M on the shape of parton quasi-distributions Q(y, p3), in particular on its change with the change of the nucleon momentum p3. We observe that the usual target-mass corrections induced by the M-dependence of the twist-2 operators are rather small. Moreover, we show that within the framework based on parametrizations by transverse momentum dependent distribution functions (TMDs) these corrections are canceled by higher-twist contributions. We identify a novel source of kinematic target-mass dependence of TMDs and build models corrected for such dependence. We find that resulting changes may be safely neglected for p3 ≳ 2M. (C) 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V