Abstract. Transverse-spin physics has been very active and rapidly developing in the last few years. In this talk, I will briefly summarize recent theoretical developments, focusing on the associated QCD dynamics in transverse spin physics.
Keywords:Single transverse-spin asymmetries PACS: 12.38. Bx, 12.39.St, 13.85.Qk There have been strong experimental interests on transverse spin physics around the world, from the deep inelastic scattering experiments such as the HERMES collaboration at DESY, SMC at CERN, and Hall A and CLAS at JLab, the proton-proton collider experiment from RHIC at Brookhaven, and the very relevant e + e − annihilation experiment from BELLE at KEK. One of the major goals in transverse spin physics is to study the quark transversity distribution, the last unknown leading-twist quark distribution in nucleon. Besides the quark transversity distribution, the transverse spin physics also opened a new window to explore the partonic structure of nucleon, the so-called transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distributions. TMD parton distribution is an extension to the usual Feynman parton distributions. These distributions allow us to study the three-dimension picture of partons inside the nucleon, and they are also closely related to the generalized parton distributions and the parton orbital angular momenta. Especially, the single transverse spin asymmetry (SSA) phenomena in high energy hadronic processes have attracted many theoretical and experimental investigations. The SSA is defined as the asymmetry when one of the hadrons' transverse spin is flipped,. It has been a great theoretical challenge in the understanding of these phenomena. This is because the leading partonic contribution to the SSA vanish in the leading order, whereas the experimental observation show that these SSAs are in tens of percentage in the forward scattering of the polarized nucleon.Recent theoretical developments have made great progress in the exploration of the underlying physics for the single spin phenomena. It is impossible to cover all these exciting physics in this short talk. Rather, I would like to focus on one important subject,