Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the polarized hadroproduction of heavy flavors

Bojak, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1765-3502 and Stratmann, M. (2003) Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the polarized hadroproduction of heavy flavors. Physical Review D, 67 (3). 034010. ISSN 1550-2368 doi: 10.1103/PhysRevD.67.034010

Abstract/Summary

We present the complete next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the polarized hadroproduction of heavy flavors which soon will be studied experimentally in polarized pp collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in order to constrain the polarized gluon density Δg. It is demonstrated that the dependence on unphysical renormalization and factorization scales is strongly reduced beyond the leading order. The sensitivity of the charm quark spin asymmetry to Δg is analyzed in some detail, including the limited detector acceptance for leptons from charm quark decays at the BNL RHIC.