Abstract
As the world’s only polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven plays an important role in understanding the spin structure of the proton. The STAR detector, with its large acceptance for calorimetry and tracking, has been used to study polarized proton collisions for more than a decade with a range of jet, meson, and boson probes. We will discuss jets, neutral pions, and W bosons as probes of the proton’s helicity structure. Here STAR measurements have significant impact on global fits of sea quark polarizations and have provided the first firm evidence of non-zero gluon polarization within the proton. We will discuss W/Z bosons, jets, pions, and pion-jet correlations as probes of the transverse spin structure of the proton, and we will use the example of a proposed dijet measurement with an upgraded STAR detector to peer into the future.
Highlights
Understanding the proton’s spin structure is a fundamental goal of QCD and of nuclear physics
1970’s large transverse spin asymmetries were observed in forward pion production from polarized proton collisions in a fixed target experiment [2], when, naively, extremely small transverse asymmetries were expected
As the world’s only polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has an important role to play in understanding the spin structure of the proton
Summary
Understanding the proton’s spin structure is a fundamental goal of QCD and of nuclear physics. 1970’s large transverse spin asymmetries were observed in forward pion production from polarized proton collisions in a fixed target experiment [2], when, naively, extremely small transverse asymmetries were expected. As the world’s only polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has an important role to play in understanding the spin structure of the proton. An overview of the heavy ion physics program at STAR can be found in these same proceedings [5]
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