On the resolution of the sign of gluon polarization in the proton

Abstract

Recently the possible existence of negative gluon helicity, $\Delta g$, has been observed to be compatible with existing empirical constraints, including from jet production in polarized proton-proton collisions at RHIC, and lattice QCD data on polarized gluon Ioffe time distributions. We perform a new global analysis of polarized parton distributions in the proton with new constraints from the high-$x$ region of deep-inelastic scattering (DIS). A dramatic reduction in the quality of the fit for the negative $\Delta g$ replicas compared to those with positive $\Delta g$ suggest that the negative $\Delta g$ solution cannot simultaneously account for high-$x$ polarized DIS data along with lattice and polarized jet data.