Determination of gluon polarization from deep inelastic scattering and collider data

TL;DR

This paper performs a global analysis of polarized lepton-nucleon scattering and collider data to better understand the polarized gluon distribution in nucleons, highlighting the potential of RHIC and JLab experiments to reduce uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis combining RHIC and JLab data to constrain the polarized gluon distribution, including the impact of future measurements.

Findings

RHIC $$ pi0 data favor a node-type gluon distribution.

JLab-E07-011 data can significantly reduce gluon distribution uncertainties.

Gluon polarization is positive at large $x$ due to scaling violations.

Abstract

We investigate impact of $\pi^0$-production data at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and future E07-011 experiment for the structure function $g_1$ of the deuteron at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) on studies of nucleonic spin structure, especially on the polarized gluon distribution function. By global analyses of polarized lepton-nucleon scattering and the $\pi^0$-production data, polarized parton distribution functions are determined and their uncertainties are estimated by the Hessian method. Two types of the gluon distribution function are investigated. One is a positive distribution and the other is a node-type distribution which changes sign at $x \sim 0.1$. Although the RHIC $\pi^0$ data seem to favor the node type for $\Delta g(x)$, it is difficult to determine a precise functional form from the current data. However, it is interesting to find that the gluon distribution $\Delta g(x)$ is positive at large $x$ ($>0.2$) due to constraints from the scaling violation in $g_1$ and RHIC $\pi^0$ data. The JLab-E07-011 measurements for $g_1^d$ should be also able to reduce the gluon uncertainty, and the reduction is comparable to the one by RUN-5 $\pi^0$-production data at RHIC. The reduction is caused by the error correlation between polarized antiquark and gluon distributions and by a next-to-leading-order (NLO) gluonic effect in the structure function $g_1^d$. We find that the JLab-E07-011 data are accurate enough to probe the NLO gluonic term in $g_1$. Both RHIC and JLab data contribute to better determination of the polarized gluon distribution in addition to improvement on polarized quark and antiquark distributions.