Quark Flavor Tagging in Polarized Hadronic Processes

Abstract

We describe a general approach to quark flavor tagging in polarized hadronic processes, with particular emphasis on semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering. A formalism is introduced that allows one to relate chosen quark flavor polarizations to an arbitrary combination of final-state hadron spin asymmetries. Within the context of the presented formalism, we quantify the sensitivity of various semi-inclusive hadron asymmetries to the light quark flavors. We show that unpolarized Lambda's may allow one to measure strange quark and antiquark polarizations independently. We also highlight several applications of our formalism, particularly to measurements intended to probe further the spin structure of the nucleon.