Charmed hadron production in polarized pp reactions as a probe of polarized gluons in the proton

Abstract

To probe the behavior of polarized gluons in the proton, we propose the charmed hadron, such as Λ c + and D ∗ , production in the forthcoming RHIC experiments. We found that the spin correlation between the target proton and the produced Λ c + baryon might be a good signal for testing models of the polarized gluon distribution in the proton.