Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We investigate the Collins azimuthal asymmetry of hadrons produced inside jets in transversely polarized proton–proton collisions. Recently, the quark transversity distributions and the Collins fragmentation functions have been extracted within global analyses from data of the processes semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering and electron–positron annihilation. We calculate the Collins azimuthal asymmetry for charged pions inside jets using these extractions for RHIC kinematics at center-of-mass energies of 200 and 500 GeV. We compare our results with recent data from the STAR Collaboration at RHIC and find good agreement, which confirms the universality of the Collins fragmentation functions. In addition, we further explore the impact of transverse momentum dependent evolution effects.