Polarized Heavy Quark Photoproduction in Next to Leading Order

TL;DR

This paper presents a next-to-leading order analytic calculation of polarized heavy quark photoproduction, demonstrating the potential to determine the polarized gluon distribution at CERN and HERA through specific measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first NLO analytic results for polarized heavy quark photoproduction and explores its use in extracting the polarized gluon distribution.

Findings

Differential cross sections and asymmetries computed for CERN and HERA energies.

Determination of polarized gluon distribution is feasible with certain acceptance cuts.

Results support future experimental efforts to probe gluon polarization.

Abstract

Results of our next-to-leading order analytic calculation for longitudinally polarized photoproduction of heavy quarks are presented. Certain differential cross sections and the corresponding asymmetries are computed for energy ranges accessible to CERN and HERA. We argue that determination of the polarized gluon distribution is possible at both places: at HERA certain acceptance cuts are necessary.