Accessing gluon polarization with high-$P_T$ hadrons in SIDIS

Abstract

A recent global QCD analysis of jet production and other polarized scattering data has found the presence of negative solutions for the gluon helicity distribution in the proton, $\Delta g$, along with the traditional $\Delta g>0$ solutions. We consider polarized semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering for hadrons produced with large transverse momentum as a means of constraining the dependence of $\Delta g$ on the parton momentum fraction, $x$. Focusing on the double longitudinal spin asymmetry, we identify the kinematics relevant for future experiments at Jefferson Lab and the Electron-Ion Collider which are particularly sensitive to the polarized gluon channel and could discriminate between the different $\Delta g$ behaviors.

Comments: 22 pages, 7 figures