Abstract
In 2015 the PHENIX collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider recorded p+p, p+Al, and p+Au collision data at center of mass energies of sNN=200 GeV with the proton beam(s) transversely polarized. At very forward rapidities η>6.8 relative to the polarized proton beam, neutrons were detected either inclusively or in (anti)correlation with detector activity related to hard collisions. The resulting single spin asymmetries, that were previously reported, have now been extracted as a function of the transverse momentum of the neutron as well as its longitudinal momentum fraction xF. The explicit kinematic dependence, combined with the correlation information allows for a closer look at the interplay of different mechanisms suggested to describe these asymmetries, such as hadronic interactions or electromagnetic interactions in ultraperipheral collisions, UPC. Events that are correlated with a hard collision indeed display a mostly negative asymmetry that increases in magnitude as a function of transverse momentum with only little dependence on xF. In contrast, events that are not likely to have emerged from a hard collision display positive asymmetries for the nuclear collisions with a kinematic dependence that resembles that of a UPC based model. Because the UPC interaction depends strongly on the charge of the nucleus, those effects are very small for p+p collisions, moderate for p+Al collisions, and large for p+Au collisions.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 032004 |
Journal | Physical Review D |
Volume | 105 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 1 2022 |
Funding
We thank the staff of the Collider-Accelerator and Physics Departments at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the staff of the other PHENIX participating institutions for their vital contributions. We acknowledge support from the Office of Nuclear Physics in the Office of Science of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Abilene Christian University Research Council, Research Foundation of SUNY, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Vanderbilt University (U.S.A), Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan), Natural Science Foundation of China (People\u2019s Republic of China), Croatian Science Foundation and Ministry of Science and Education (Croatia), Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (Czech Republic), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Commissariat \u00E0 l\u2019\u00C9nergie Atomique, and Institut National de Physique Nucl\u00E9aire et de Physique des Particules (France), J. Bolyai Research Scholarship, EFOP, the New National Excellence Program (\u00DANKP), NKFIH, and OTKA (Hungary), Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology (India), Israel Science Foundation (Israel), Basic Science Research and SRC(CENuM) Programs through NRF funded by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and ICT (Korea). Ministry of Education and Science, Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Agency of Atomic Energy (Russia), VR and Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden), the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union, the Hungarian American Enterprise Scholarship Fund, the US-Hungarian Fulbright Foundation, and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation.