Speaker
Description
The partonic structure of the proton has been established in deep inelastic scattering and a detailed picture of the nucleon has emerged from a wide range of experiments and global analyses. Hadronic collisions allow direct access to the gluon content in the nucleon and polarized beams introduce an additional degree of freedom, spin, which is naturally connected to parton kinematics. Polarized proton collisions at RHIC have, for the first time, established a significant contribution of the gluon spin to the spin of the proton. They have similarly improved our knowledge of the sea quark polarization. In addition, transverse spin phenomena are enabling studies of transverse momentum dependent distribution functions and spin-orbit correlations beyond a one-dimensional image. At the same time, they are closely linked to questions about universality of the process dependence of color exchanges, factorization, and possibly saturation effects a very small partonic momenta.
