2018/05/31 by C. Aidala, Y. Akiba, M. Alfred +289 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ex #nucl-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.98.012006
published as Phys. Rev. D 98, 012006 (2018) · 294 authors from 64 institutions, 11 pages, 5 figures, and 4 tables. v2 is version accepted for publication in Physical Review D. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html
arxiv created 2018/07/09 · arxiv updated 2019/08/13
We report the transverse single-spin asymmetries of J/ψ production at forward and backward rapidity, 1.2<|y|<2.2, as a function of J/ψ transverse momentum (pT) and Feynman-x (xF). The data analyzed were recorded by the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 2015 from p+p, p+Al, and p+Au collisions with transversely polarized proton beams at √s_NN=200 GeV. At this collision energy, single-spin asymmetries for heavy-flavor particle production of p+p collisions provide access to the spin-dependent gluon distribution and higher-twist correlation functions inside the nucleon, such as the gluon Qiu-Sterman and trigluon correlation functions. Proton+nucleus collisions offer an excellent opportunity to study nuclear effects on the correlation functions. The data indicate negative asymmetries at the two-standard-deviation level in the p+Au data for pT<2 GeV/c at both forward and backward rapidity, while in p+p and p+Al collisions the asymmetries are consistent with zero within the range of experimental uncertainties.