Measurement of longitudinal spin asymmetries for weak boson production in polarized proton-proton collisions at RHIC

Abstract

We report measurements of single- and double-spin asymmetries for W± and Z/γ* boson production in longitudinally polarized p+p collisions at s=510GeV by the STAR experiment at RHIC. The asymmetries for W± were measured as a function of the decay lepton pseudorapidity, which provides a theoretically clean probe of the proton's polarized quark distributions at the scale of the W mass. The results are compared to theoretical predictions, constrained by polarized deep inelastic scattering measurements, and show a preference for a sizable, positive up antiquark polarization in the range 0.05