https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20159503013
Spin physics highlights from STAR
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, 46383, USA
a e-mail: adam.gibson-even@valpo.edu
Published online: 29 May 2015
As the world’s only polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven plays an important role in understanding the spin structure of the proton. The STAR detector, with its large acceptance for calorimetry and tracking, has been used to study polarized proton collisions for more than a decade with a range of jet, meson, and boson probes. We will discuss jets, neutral pions, and W bosons as probes of the proton’s helicity structure. Here STAR measurements have significant impact on global fits of sea quark polarizations and have provided the first firm evidence of non-zero gluon polarization within the proton. We will discuss W/Z bosons, jets, pions, and pion-jet correlations as probes of the transverse spin structure of the proton, and we will use the example of a proposed dijet measurement with an upgraded STAR detector to peer into the future.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
