Speaker
George Igo
(University of California Los Angeles)
Description
The production of W bosons in longitudinally polarized p+p collisions at
RHIC provides a new means of studying the spin-flavor asymmetries of the proton
sea quark distributions. W bosons are produced in \bar u+d(\bar d u) collisions and
can be detected through their leptonic decays where only the
charged lepton is detected. Precise tracking information, provided by the STAR
Time Projection Chamber (TPC) at mid-rapidity, allows for a determination of the
charge sign of the high pT e-(+). The large acceptance of the TPC and Electromagnetic
Calorimeters is well suited to place isolation requirements on the e-(+)
and to veto on the away side energy, which reduces the large QCD background
by several orders of magnitude, yielding a clean W signal. Preliminary results for
the W production cross section and parity-violating single-spin asymmetry
A_L from the STAR Collaborations 2009 data at \sqrt{s} = 500 GeV, as well as future
projections of the STAR W spin program at mid-rapidity and forward rapidity,
will be presented.
Primary author
George Igo
(University of California Los Angeles)
