PROCEEDINGS OF RIKEN BNL RESEARCH CENTER WORKSHOP ON SPIN PHYSICS AT RHIC IN YEAR-1 AND BEYOND

The much anticipated RHIC spin physics program will commence this fall when the first physics run with colliding beams of polarized protons is expected. More specifically, the planned year-1 RHIC-Spin measurements are (1) the double-spin asymmetry ALLπ in production of pions by collisions of longitudinally polarized protons (in order to obtain first information on the proton's spin-dependent gluon density, Δg); (2) the transverse single-spin asymmetry ANπ for pion production. These two reactions provided part of the motivation for our workshop. On the first day there were informative talks on the specific plans of STAR (by Rakness) and PHENIX (by Goto) for the polarized run of Year-1. Some of the theoretical questions related to the double-spin asymmetry ALLπ were discussed on the first day by Vogelsang and Kretzer, which centered mostly around the questions of how well the unpolarized fragmentation functions are known, the need for next-to-leading order calculations, and on how sensitive the asymmetry is to the possible Δg distributions. Vetterli presented HERMES measurements of fragmentation functions, which overlap in Q2 with the future lower-pT measurements at RHIC