Spin physics highlights from STAR

Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, 46383, USA

^a e-mail: adam.gibson-even@valpo.edu

Published online: 29 May 2015

Abstract

As the world’s only polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven plays an important role in understanding the spin structure of the proton. The STAR detector, with its large acceptance for calorimetry and tracking, has been used to study polarized proton collisions for more than a decade with a range of jet, meson, and boson probes. We will discuss jets, neutral pions, and W bosons as probes of the proton’s helicity structure. Here STAR measurements have significant impact on global fits of sea quark polarizations and have provided the first firm evidence of non-zero gluon polarization within the proton. We will discuss W/Z bosons, jets, pions, and pion-jet correlations as probes of the transverse spin structure of the proton, and we will use the example of a proposed dijet measurement with an upgraded STAR detector to peer into the future.