Direct Probes of Linearly Polarized Gluons inside Unpolarized Hadrons

Abstract

We show that linearly polarized gluons inside unpolarized hadrons can be directly probed in jet or heavy quark pair production in electron-hadron collisions. We discuss the simplest cos (2 phi) asymmetries and estimate their maximal value, concluding that measurements of the unknown linearly polarized gluon distribution in the proton should be feasible in future EIC or LHeC experiments. Analogous asymmetries in hadron-hadron collisions suffer from factorization breaking contributions and would allow to quantify the importance of initial and final state interactions.