Study of the gluon polarization in the proton with a silicon vertex upgrade at RHIC/PHENIX

TL;DR

This paper discusses how the silicon vertex tracker upgrade at RHIC/PHENIX enhances the measurement of gluon polarization in protons through simulations of direct-photon and heavy-flavor production.

Contribution

The paper presents a detailed simulation study demonstrating improved gluon polarization measurements enabled by the silicon vertex tracker upgrade.

Findings

Enhanced precision in gluon polarization measurements

Significant improvement in heavy-flavor production detection

Better sensitivity for direct-photon production analysis

Abstract

PHENIX has a well defined program for measuring the polarized gluon distribution in the nucleon. We measure the gluon polarization in the proton with polarized $p$-$p$ collisions at PHENIX. The measurements of gluon polarization $via$ the direct-photon production and the heavy-flavor production can be significantly improved by the silicon vertex tracker upgrade. We have studied the possible improvements of the gluon polarization measurements using Monte Carlo simulation and they are shown and discussed in this paper.