Charmed Hadron Production in Polarized pp Reactions as a Probe of Polarized Gluons in the Proton

Abstract

To probe the behavior of polarized gluons in the proton, we propose the charmed hadron, such as Lambda_c and D^*, production in the forthcoming RHIC experiments. We found that the spin correlation between the target proton and the produced Lambda_c baryon might be a good signal for testing models of the polarized gluon distribution in the proton.

1+5 pages, 4 figures, Contributed to 16th International Conference on Particles and Nuclei (PANIC 02), Osaka, Japan, 30 Sep - 4 Oct 2002