Hadron plus photon production in polarized hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order QCD corrections for hadron plus photon production in polarized hadronic collisions, enhancing the ability to probe the spin-dependent gluon distribution at RHIC.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO QCD calculations for this process, enabling more precise extraction of gluon polarization from experimental data.

Findings

Improved reconstruction of partonic kinematics from measurable variables.

Potential to reveal the spin-dependent gluon distribution with higher accuracy.

Enhanced theoretical predictions for RHIC experiments.

Abstract

We compute the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the polarized (and unpolarized) cross sections for the production of a hadron accompanied by an opposite-side prompt photon. This process, being studied at RHIC, permits us to reconstruct partonic kinematics using experimentally measurable variables. We study the correlation between the reconstructed momentum fractions and the true partonic ones, which in the polarized case might allow us to reveal the spin-dependent gluon distribution with a higher precision.