Study of the gluon polarization in the proton with a silicon vertex upgrade at RHIC/PHENIX

Abstract

PHENIX has a well defined program for measuring the polarized gluon distribution in the nucleon. We measure the gluon polarization in the proton with polarized $p$-$p$ collisions at PHENIX. The measurements of gluon polarization $via$ the direct-photon production and the heavy-flavor production can be significantly improved by the silicon vertex tracker upgrade. We have studied the possible improvements of the gluon polarization measurements using Monte Carlo simulation and they are shown and discussed in this paper.