Estimating the Applicability of TMD Factorization to JLab CLAS12 Kinematics*

This study applies a new tool, referred to as affinity, for estimating the applicability of factorization theorems to the kinematics of JLab fixed target electron-nucleon scattering experiments. Factorization theorems in Quantum Chromodynamics enable one to separate the intrinsic properties of the proton from the hard scattering process and are therefore essential to extract the dynamics of quarks and gluons in the proton. These theorems make approximations which depend on the kinematics of the process. Recently, a new measure called affinity was defined to gauge how well these approximations hold up in different kinematical bins. However, a precise determination of affinity requires knowledge of partonic kinematics, which are a priori unknown. In this work, we use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate these kinematics more precisely and compare the results with simpler models used previously. For the specific case of the CLAS12 experiment at Jefferson Lab, we investigate at which kinematics factorization is valid and how our solution improves on previous simplified models.