Measurement of Nucleon Spin Structure at RHIC

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This grant supports the participation of the Penn State University inthe STAR experiment at Brookhaven, including a full time researchassociate, Akio Ogawa, at Brookhaven Lab. The principal interest of thePenn State group involves the study of proton spin structure withexperiments using polarized proton beams at RHIC. The approved upgradesto the STAR detector for this physics include an EMC (Electro-MagneticCalorimeter). As this system comes online, STAR will be capable ofreconstructing the higher rate, higher transverse momentum interactionsthat are needed for polarized structure function measurements. Theutilization of these new features for a meaningful measurement of protonspin structure presents a very large software challenge. Penn State isdeveloping software that will be required to simulate, collect andanalyzed these data from STAR. Some polarized proton running at RHIC isexpected each year for the next several years and will likely be inincreasingly important component of the STAR program. The centralobjective of these experiments will be the measurement of thecontribution of gluon fields to the proton spin.