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

Abstract

We report measurements of single- and double-spin asymmetries for W± and Z/ɣ* boson production 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\u27s 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 \u3c x \u3c 0.2

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