Transverse momentum and its compensation in current and target jets in deep inelastic muon-proton scattering

Abstract Results are presented on the transverse momentum distributions of charged hadrons in 280 GeV muon-proton deep inelastic interactions. The transverse momenta are defined relative to the accurately measured virtual photon direction and the experiment has almost complete angular acceptance for the final state hadrons. Significantly larger values of the average transverse momentum squared are found for the forward going hadrons than for the target remnants. This result, combined with a study of the rapidity region over which the transverse momentum is compensated, can be explained by a significant contribution from soft gluon radiation, but not by a large value of the primordial transverse momentum of the struck quark.