Measurement of Longitudinal Spin Asymmetries for Weak Boson Production in Polarized Proton-Proton Collisions at RHIC

Adamczyk, L. and Adkins, J. K. and Agakishiev, G. and Aggarwal, M. M. and Ahammed, Z. and Alekseev, I. and Alford, J. and Anson, C. D. and Aparin, A. and Arkhipkin, D. and Aschenauer, E. C. and Averichev, G. S. and Balewski, J. and Banerjee, A. and Beavis, D. R. and Bellwied, R. and Bhasin, A. and Bhati, A. K. and Bhattarai, P. and Bichsel, H. and Bielcik, J. and Bielcikova, J. and Bland, L. C. and Bordyuzhin, I. G. and Borowski, W. and Bouchet, J. and Brandin, A. V. and Brovko, S. G. and Bultmann, S. and Bunzarov, I. and Vértesi, Róbert (2014) Measurement of Longitudinal Spin Asymmetries for Weak Boson Production in Polarized Proton-Proton Collisions at RHIC. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, 113 (7). ISSN 0031-9007

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Abstract

We report measurements of single- and double-spin asymmetries for W ± and Z/γ∗ boson produc- tion in longitudinally polarized p + p collisions at √s = 510 GeV by the STAR experiment at RHIC. The asymmetries for W ± were measured as a function of the decay lepton pseudorapidity, which provides a theoretically clean probe of the proton’s polarized quark distributions at the scale of the W mass. The results are compared to theoretical predictions, constrained by polarized deep inelastic scattering measurements, and show a preference for a sizable, positive up antiquark polarization in the range 0.05 < x < 0.2.

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