Improved Measurement of Double Helicity Asymmetry in Inclusive Midrapidity pi^0 Production for Polarized p+p Collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV

Abstract

We present an improved measurement of the double helicity asymmetry for pi^0 production in polarized proton-proton scattering at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV employing the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The improvements to our previous measurement come from two main factors: Inclusion of a new data set from the 2004 RHIC run with higher beam polarizations than the earlier run and a recalibration of the beam polarization measurements, which resulted in reduced uncertainties and increased beam polarizations. The results are compared to a Next to Leading Order (NLO) perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) calculation with a range of polarized gluon distributions.

389 authors, 4 pages, 2 tables, 1 figure. Submitted to Phys. Rev. D, Rapid Communications. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html

References in corpus (4)

• Models for the Polarized Parton Distributions of the Nucleon
• Mid-Rapidity Neutral Pion Production in Proton-Proto Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to high-p_T pion production in longitudinally polarized pp collisions
• Double Helicity Asymmetry in Inclusive Mid-Rapidity neutral pion Production for Polarized p+p Collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV

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