Jet cross sections in polarized photon-hadron collisions

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order polarized jet cross sections in photon-hadron collisions, providing tools to analyze jet production and constrain polarized parton densities at HERA energies.

Contribution

It introduces a Monte Carlo code for NLO polarized jet cross sections and refines the polarized Weizsaecker-Williams function with a universal non-logarithmic term.

Findings

Results are perturbatively stable for HERA energies.

The study discusses constraining polarized parton densities using jet data.

The code enables detailed phenomenological analysis of polarized jet production.

Abstract

We present a computation of one- and two-jet cross sections in polarized photon-hadron collisions, which is accurate to next-to-leading order in QCD. Our results can be used to compute photoproduction cross sections in electron-proton scattering. To this purpose, we investigate the structure of the polarized Weizsaecker-Williams function, where we include a universal, non-logarithmic term, neglected in the literature. We construct a Monte Carlo code, within the framework of the subtraction method, and we use it to study the phenomenology of jet production in the energy range relevant to HERA. In particular, we investigate the perturbative stability of our results, and we discuss the possibility of constraining polarized parton densities of the proton and the photon using jet data.