Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to Heavy Quark Correlations in Longitudinally Polarized Hadron-Hadron Collisions

Abstract

We present a comprehensive phenomenological study of heavy flavor distributions and correlations in longitudinally polarized proton-proton collisions at BNL-RHIC. All results are obtained with a flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program at next-to-leading order accuracy and include the fragmentation into heavy mesons, their subsequent semi-leptonic decays, and experimental cuts. Next-to-leading order QCD corrections are found to be significant for both cross sections and double-spin asymmetries. The sensitivity of heavy flavor measurements at BNL-RHIC to the gluon polarization of the nucleon is assessed. Electron-muon and muon-muon correlations turn out to be the most promising observables. Theoretical uncertainties are estimated by varying renormalization and factorization scales, heavy quark masses, and fragmentation parameters.

21 pages, 18 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to Inclusive Heavy-Flavor Production in Polarized Deep-Inelastic Scattering
• Double Spin Asymmetry of Electrons from Heavy Flavor Decays in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV
• Longitudinally Polarized Photoproduction of Heavy Flavors at Next-to-Leading Order of QCD
• Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to Heavy-Flavour Production in Neutral Current DIS
• Differential Heavy Quark Distributions and Correlations in Longitudinally Polarized Deep-Inelastic Scattering