Speaker
Renee Fatemi
(University of Kentucky)
Description
For over a decade the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has facilitated the development of a rich and diverse spin physics program by consistently providing polarized proton collisions over a wide range of center-of-mass energies. Several pieces of this program, such as the inclusive jet and pion double spin asymmetries that probe the gluon helicity distribution, the W and Z boson observables that are sensitive to the flavor asymmetry of the polarized sea and the large but unexplained transverse single spin asymmetries in the forward direction, have been anticipated and pursued since the inception of the RHIC spin effort. However, the versatility of the collider as well as the STAR and PHENIX detectors, has allowed the spin program to evolve and respond to new and pressing questions in the hadronic spin community. Examples include a burgeoning mid-rapidity transverse spin program that will provide access to the transversity distributions for the first time in hadronic collisions and several critical tests of the predicted Sivers' sign-change in Drell-Yan and direct photon processes. The successes of the flagship measurements, as well as the surprising and novel new directions taken by the RHIC spin program, will be presented and their implications for the future directions of the nuclear physics community will be discussed.
Primary author
Renee Fatemi
(University of Kentucky)
