QCD Corrections to the Polarized Drell-Yan Process

Abstract

The results of a recent calculation of the QCD corrections to the longitudinally polarized Drell-Yan process are summarized. In addition to the parity conserving double spin asymmetry which is already accessible in the Drell-Yan production of lepton pairs at fixed target energies, we consider parity violating single spin asymmetries appearing only in the production of massive vector bosons at polarized hadron colliders. The prospects for extracting polarized quark distributions from asymmetries in vector boson production at RHIC are briefly discussed.

7 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures included, Invited Talk given at the Workshop "Deep Inelastic Scattering off Polarized Targets: Theory meets Experiment", Zeuthen, September 1997