HERMES AND THE SPIN OF THE PROTON

Abstract

HERMES is a second generation experiment to study the spin structure of the nucleon, in which measurements of the spin dependent properties of semi-inclusive deep-inelastic lepton scattering are emphasized. Data have been accumulated for semi-inclusive pion, kaon, and proton double-spin asymmetries, as well as for high-pT hadron pairs, and single-spin azimuthal asymmetries for pion electroproduction and deep virtual Compton scattering. These results provide information on the flavor decomposition of the polarized quark distributions in the nucleon and a first glimpse of the gluon polarization, while the observation of the azimuthal asymmetries show promise for probing the tensor spin of the nucleon and isolating the total angular momentum carried by the quarks.