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Transversity distributions in the nucleon in the large-N_c limit

We compute the quark and antiquark transversity distributions in the nucleon at a low normalization point of 600 MeV in the large-$N_c$ limit, where the nucleon can be described as a soliton of an effective chiral theory (chiral quark-soliton model). The flavor-nonsinglet distributions, $δu(x) - δd(x)$ and $δ\bar u(x) - δ\bar d(x)$, appear in leading order of the $1/N_c$-expansion, while the flavor-singlet distributions, $δu(x) + δd(x)$ and $δ\bar u(x) + δ\bar d(x)$, are non-zero only in next-to-leading order. The transversity quark and antiquark distributions are found to be significantly different from the longitudinally polarized distributions $Δu (x) \pm Δd (x)$ and $Δ\bar u (x) \pm Δ\bar d (x)$, respectively, in contrast to the prediction of the naive non-relativistic quark model. We show that this affects the predictions for the spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan pair production in transversely polarized pp and ppbar collisions.