Study of the quark helicity distribution through parity-violating single spin asymmetries in proton proton collisions

Parity-violating single spin asymmetries in proton proton collisions are very promising observables to study the quark helicity distribution in the proton. In particular, they allow one to perform a flavor separation as well as a separation of the quark and antiquark densities. While previous theoretical studies of such asymmetries exclusively focused on leptonic final states we present the first estimate with hadronic final states. To lowest order the asymmetry is generated by an interference of a strong and an electroweak partonic scattering amplitude. We present first results for RHIC kinematics for the production of a single jet as well as a charmed hadron. (orig.)