Abstract

We consider the inclusive production of longitudinally polarized baryons in p? p collisions at RHIC-BNL, with one longitudinally polarized proton. We study the spin transfer between the initial proton and the produced baryon as a function of its rapidity and we elucidate its sensitivity to the quark helicity distributions of the proton and to the polarized fragmentation functions of the quark into the baryon. We make predictions using an SU(6) quark spectator model and a perturbative QCD (pQCD) based model. We discuss these different predictions, and what can be learned from them, in view of the forthcoming experiments at RHIC-BNL. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.