Charmed Hadron Production in Polarized pp Collisions

Abstract

To extract information about polarized gluons in the proton, production of charmed hadrons, in particular, \Lambda_c^+ baryon in pp collisions was studied. We calculated the transverse momentum distribution and the pseudo-rapidity distribution of the spin correlation asymmetry A_{LL} between the initial proton and the produced \Lambda_c^+. Those statistical sensitivities were also calculated under the condition of RHIC experiment. We found that the pseudo-rapidity distribution of A_{LL} is promising for testing the model of polarized gluons in the proton and also the spin-dependent fragmentation model of a charm quark decaying into \Lambda_c^+ baryon.

Comments: 1+6 pages, Latex2e, 4 eps figures, Talk given at SPIN 2002, Brookhaven National Laboratory, September 9-13, 2002, To appear in the Proceedings