Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Accessing Gluon Polarization with Large-P_T Hadrons in SIDIS

Student: Richard Whitehill

School: Wichita State University

Mentored By: Nobuo Sato and Wally Melnitchouk

Recent global QCD analysis of jet production and other polarized scattering data observed the existence of negative solutions for the gluon helicity distribution in the proton, Δg, along with the traditional Δg > 0 solutions. We consider the polarized semi-inclusive deep-inelastic production of large-P_T hadrons as a means of constraining the dependence of Δg on the parton momentum fraction. Focusing on the double longitudinal spin asymmetry, we identify the kinematics relevant for future experiments at Jefferson Lab and the Electron-Ion Collider which are particularly sensitive to the polarized gluon channel and could discriminate between the different Δg behaviors.

[Watch the presentation on YouTube]