Letter of Intent for a Drell-Yan Experiment with a Polarized Proton Target

Technical Report · Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1296770· OSTI ID:1296770

Geesaman, D. ^[1]; Reimer, P. ^[1]; Brown, C. ^[2]; Christian, D. ^[2]; Diefenthaler, M. ^[3]; Peng, J. -C. ^[3]; Chang, W. -C. ^[4]; Chen, Y. -C. ^[4]; Sawada, S. ^[5]; Chang, T. -H. ^[6]; Huang, J. ^[7]; Jiang, X. ^[7]; Leitch, M. ^[7]; Klein, A. ^[7]; Liu, K. ^[7]; Liu, M. ^[7]; McGaughey, P. ^[7]; Beise, E. ^[8]; Nakahara, K. ^[8]; Aidala, C. ^[9] ; Lorenzon, W. ^[9]; Raymond, R. ^[9]; Badman, T. ^[10]; Long, E. ^[10]; Slifer, K. ^[10]; Zielinski, R. ^[10]; Guo, R. -S. ^[11]; Goto, Y. ^[12]; El Fassi, L. ^[13]; Myers, K. ^[13]; Ransome, R. ^[13]; Tadepalli, A. ^[13]; Tice, B. ^[13]; Chen, J. -P. ^[14]; Nakano, K. ^[15]; Shibata, T. -A. ^[15]; Crabb, D. ^[16]; Day, D. ^[16]; Keller, D. ^[16]; Rondon, O. ^[16]

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1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
2. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
3. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL (United States)
4. Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)
5. High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba (Japan)
6. LIng-Tung Univ. (Taiwan)
7. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
8. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
9. Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
10. Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH (United States)
11. National Kaohsiung Normal Univ. (Taiwan)
12. RIKEN, Saitama (Japan)
13. Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ (United States)
14. Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), Newport News, VA (United States)
15. Tokyo Inst. of Technology (Japan)
16. Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (United States)

It is well known that the proton is a spin-1/2 particle, but how the constituents (quarks and gluons) assemble to this quantized spin is still a mystery. There is a worldwide effort to map out the individual contributions to the proton spin. It is established that the quark spins contribute around 30%, while the gluon intrinsic angular momentum is still under active investigation at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Fully resolving the proton spin puzzle requires information on the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of both quarks and gluons. Recent studies have shown that the so-called transverse momentum-dependent parton distribution functions (TMDs) can inform us about the OAM of the partons. One of the most important TMDs, and the main focus of this LOI, is the so-called Sivers function. To summarize, we propose to make the first measurement of the Sivers function of sea quarks, which is expected to be non-zero if the sea quarks contribute orbital angular momentum to the proton spin, as expected from the pion cloud model, which also partially explains the E866 results. Thus, we will be able to deduce whether or not sea quark orbital motion contributes significantly to the proton spin. Specifically, we will determine the contribution from the anti-up quarks, with Bjorken-x in the range of ~ 0.1 to 0.5. Drell-Yan production off a polarized proton target has never been measured, and is complementary to the recently approved (stage-1) experiment E1027 at Fermilab, which will measure the Sivers function of the valence quarks using a polarized proton beam on an unpolarized proton target. If the measured sea quark Sivers function is non-zero, we will also determine its sign.

• Research Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-07CH11359
• OSTI ID: 1296770
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-PROPOSAL-1039; 1309534; TRN: US1601777
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
POLARIZED TARGETS
U QUARKS
PROTONS
DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS
SPIN
ORBITAL ANGULAR MOMENTUM
GLUONS
DRELL MODEL
TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM
EXPERIMENT PLANNING
PROPOSALS