English

Probing Sea Quark and Gluon Polarization at STAR

Nuclear Experiment 2014-07-03 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

One of the primary goals of the spin program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is to determine the polarization of the sea quarks and gluons in the proton. The polarization of the sea quarks is probed through the production of W(+)W^{-(+)} bosons via the annihilation of uˉ+d(dˉ+u)\bar{u}+d\,(\bar{d}+u), at leading order. In this proceedings we report measurements of the single-spin asymmetry, ALA_{L}, for WW boson production at s=510\sqrt{s} = 510 GeV, and the new constraints these results place on the antiquark helicity distributions. Recent results on the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, ALLA_{LL}, for inclusive and di-jet production at s=200\sqrt{s} = 200 GeV are also presented. The inclusive jet results provide the first experimental indication of non-zero gluon polarization in the xx range probed at RHIC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.0404,
  title  = {Probing Sea Quark and Gluon Polarization at STAR},
  author = {Justin R. Stevens},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.0404},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, contribution to the proceedings of XXII. International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, 28 Apr - 2 May, 2014, Warsaw, Poland