Speaker
Elke Aschenauer
(BNL)
Description
A myriad of new techniques and technologies made it possible to inaugurate
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National
Laboratory as the world's first high-energy polarized proton collider in
December 2001.
RHIC delivers polarized proton-proton collisions at a center of mass
energies of up to 500 GeV. This unique environment provides opportunities
to study the polarized quark and gluon spin structure of the proton and
QCD dynamics at a high energy scale and is therefore complementary to
existing semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering experiments. Recent data
from RHIC help to significantly constrain the gluon polarization
contributing to the proton spin, and parity violating single spin
asymmetries are observed for the first time in W production by both the
PHENIX and STAR collaborations. In recent years, transverse spin phenomena
have gained attention as they offer fundamental tests of our understanding
of color forces, transversity, and orbital angular momentum. We present
the latest results from the PHENIX and STAR experiments and will discuss
the near and mid-term future prospects of the facility with an emphasis on
the Drell-Yan mechanism.
The talk will be summarized presenting the long term future of the
facility the electron-ion collider.
Primary author
Elke Aschenauer
(BNL)
