A Study of Heavy Quark and Quarkonium Production in Polarized p-p collisions at RHIC

At RHIC, heavy quark production is sensitive to the gluon distribution inside the proton. The expected integrated luminosity of 3pb-1 from this year's first longitudinally polarized proton beams will provide an opportunity to study the helicity dependent heavy-quark and quarkonium production. This could lead to direct measurement of the gluon polarization in the polarized proton. I discuss the experimental sensitivity of such measurements with the PHENIX detector. New ideas to explore physics beyond the standard model with heavy quarks in the future high energy polarized p-p collisions are also discussed