Polarized proton-proton collisions provide leading-order access to gluons, presenting an opportunity to constrain gluon spin-momentum correlations within transversely polarized protons and enhance our understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the proton. Midrapidity open-heavy-flavor production at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV is dominated by gluon-gluon fusion, providing heightened sensitivity to gluon dynamics relative to other production channels. Transverse single-spin asymmetries of positrons and electrons from heavy-flavor hadron decays are measured at midrapidity using the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. These charge-separated measurements are sensitive to gluon correlators that can in principle be related to gluon orbital angular momentum via model calculations. Explicit constraints on gluon correlators are extracted for two separate models, one of which had not been constrained previously.
We present the first measurement of the electron angular distribution parameter alpha_2 in W to e nu events produced in proton-antiproton collisions as a function of the W boson transverse momentum. Our analysis is based on data collected using the D0 detector during the 1994--1995 Fermilab Tevatron run. We compare our results with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, which predicts an angular distribution of (1 +/- alpha_1 cos theta* + alpha_2 cos^2 theta*), where theta* is the polar angle of the electron in the Collins-Soper frame. In the presence of QCD corrections, the parameters alpha_1 and alpha_2 become functions of p_T^W, the W boson transverse momentum. This measurement provides a test of next-to-leading order QCD corrections which are a non-negligible contribution to the W boson mass measurement.
The D0 collaboration has performed a study of spin correlation in tt-bar production for the process tt-bar to bb-bar W^+W^-, where the W bosons decay to e-nu or mu-nu. A sample of six events was collected during an exposure of the D0 detector to an integrated luminosity of approximately 125 pb^-1 of sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV pp-bar collisions. The standard model (SM) predicts that the short lifetime of the top quark ensures the transmission of any spin information at production to the tt-bar decay products. The degree of spin correlation is characterized by a correlation coefficient k. We find that k>-0.25 at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the SM prediction of k=0.88.
Presented are the first measurements of the transverse single-spin asymmetries ($A_N$) for neutral pions and eta mesons in $p$+Au and $p$+Al collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV in the pseudorapidity range $|\eta|<$0.35 with the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The asymmetries are consistent with zero, similar to those for midrapidity neutral pions and eta mesons produced in $p$+$p$ collisions. These measurements show no evidence of additional effects that could potentially arise from the more complex partonic environment present in proton-nucleus collisions.
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