Transverse Spin and Rhic

Abstract

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is the first accelerator facility that can accelerate, store and collide spin polarized proton beams. This development enables a physics program aimed at understanding how the spin of the proton results from its quark and gluon substructures. Spin states that are either parallel (longitudinal) or perpendicular (transverse) to the proton momentum reveal important insight into the structure of the proton. This talk outlines future plans for further studies of transverse spin physics at RHIC.

Spin physics experiments at NICA-SPD with polarized proton and deuteron beams

“…Future collider DY experiments are included in the long range programs of the PHENIX and STAR at RHIC [43]. They are planning to carry out DY measurements with 500 GeV longitudinally polarized as well as with 200 GeV transversely polarized protons.…”

A Proposal for the Muon Piston Calorimeter Extension (MPC-EX) to the PHENIX Experiment at RHIC

“…PHENIX preliminary results of forward "single-cluster" MPC hits (presumably π 0 s) SSA A N , as in Figure 1.11, also showed similar large size asymmetries. One might question whether the forward reactions are hard enough to apply perturbative QCD, but as shown in Figure 1.12 the cross sections of p + p → π 0 + X are reasonably described by NLO pQCD [25] as well as by PYTHIA simulations [55]. The existence of large single spin asymmetries at very forward rapidities at RHIC, along with the good theoretical understanding of the unpolarized cross-sections gives hope that transverse spin phenomena in polarized pp collisions at RHIC can be used as a tool to probe the correlation between parton's transverse motion and the nucleon's spin in order to provide a 3-dimensional dynamical image of the nucleon.…”