Status of the RHIC Spin Program

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has been developing the capability of accelerating, storing and colliding high-energy polarized proton beams over the past several years. During this development phase, important first measurements of cross sections and spin asymmetries for neutral pions produced in polarized proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=200 GeV have been completed by STAR and PHENIX, the two large collider experiments at RHIC. This contribution reports on progress of the RHIC spin program and provides an outlook for the future.Comment: 9 pages, Contribution to the Workshop on the Structure of the Nucleon at Large Bjorken x (HiX2004), Marseille, Luminy, July, 200

Transverse Spin and RHIC

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.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Invited talk by L.C. Bland at the International Workshop on Transverse Polarisation Phenomena in Hard Processes (Transversity 2005), Villa Olmo (Como), 7-10 September 2005, to appear in the proceeding

Transverse Single Spin Asymmetries in Hadronic Interactions: an experimental overview and outlook

Transverse single-spin asymmetries (SSA) are expected to be small in perturbative QCD because of the chiral nature of the theory. Experiment shows large transverse SSA for particle produced in special kinematics. This contribution reviews the experimental situation and provide an outlook for future measurements.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures. Proceedings of Transversity 201