A complete next-to-leading order calculation of longitudinally polarized heavy quark photoproduction is presented. All results of the purturbative calculation are given in detail. For reactions and energies of interest cross sections differential in the transverse momentum and rapidity of the heavy quark, total cross sections and the corresponding asymmetries are given. Errors in the asymmetries are estimated and the possibility to distinguish between various scerarios of the polarized gluon distribution is discussed. Our results are compared with other related publications.
Results of our next-to-leading order analytic calculation for longitudinally polarized photoproduction of heavy quarks are presented. Certain differential cross sections and the corresponding asymmetries are computed for energy ranges accessible to CERN and HERA. We argue that determination of the polarized gluon distribution is possible at both places: at HERA certain acceptance cuts are necessary.Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) of longitudinally polarized particles has been very useful in extracting the polarized valence distributions. However, it is quite limited in extracting the polarized gluon distribution Ag. Much was already said at this Workshop about the importance of knowing Ag, and there is no need to talk about it any further. In order to extract Ag with a good accuracy one needs experiments involving longitudinally polarized reactions dominated by subprocesses with initial gluons.One such reaction is the inclusive polarized photoproduction of heavy quarks:which at leading order (LO) proceeds through the subprocess:There are several experimental proposals on the subject in various stages of approval [1]. Next-to-leading order corrections (NLOC) are very important for several reasons: a) The leading order estimates depend strongly on the a priory unknown renormalization and factorization scales; in general the NLOC reduce this uncertainty. More precisely, going to one level higher in the strong coupling c~ may reduce the uncertainty by order a~; b) NLOC may be large and negative in some regions of phase space, making cross sections small and difficult to measure; c) At NLO, subprocesses unrelated to the LO ones could come into play. In principle, the contribution of such subprocesses could be significant in certain important parts of *) Present address:
The results of a next-to-leading order calculation of heavy quark production in longitudinally polarized photon-nucleon collisions are presented. At c.m. energy √ S = 10 GeV, for γ + p → c + X, cross sections differential in the transverse momentum and rapidity of the charmed quark c and the corresponding asymmetries are presented; also, as functions of √ S, integrated cross sections, K-factors and the corresponding asymmetries are given. Errors in the asymmetries are estimated and the possibility to distinguish between three scerarios differing essentially in the polarized gluon distribution is discussed.
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