CP-violation in high-energy collisions of polarized protons

Abstract

We study the possibility of a large CP/T-violation in lepton pair production in the collisions of polarized protons at RHIC-BNL. We propose the single transverse spin asymmetry which quantifies the possible CP/T-violating effect in this reaction as a sensitive indicator of physics beyond the standard model(SM). We consider two examples of mechanisms beyond the SM which can generate a non-zero asymmetry of this type. They rely on the R-parity violating interactions of supersymmetric models and on phenomenological tensor interactions. We estimate the prospects for observing this effect in future experiments.