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arXiv · 2401.10814

Higgs production at RHIC and the positivity of the gluon helicity distribution

Daniel de Florian·Stefano Forte·Werner Vogelsang
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Abstract

We show that the negative polarized gluon distribution $\Delta g$ found in a recent global next-to-leading order QCD analysis of the nucleon helicity structure is incompatible with the fundamental requirement that physical cross-sections must not be negative. Specifically, we show that the fact that this polarized gluon strongly violates the positivity condition $|\Delta g|\leq g$ in terms of the unpolarized gluon distribution $g$ leads to negative cross-sections for Higgs boson production at RHIC as a physical process, implying that this negative $\Delta g$ is unphysical.

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Daniel de Florian, Stefano Forte, Werner Vogelsang. 2024-01-19. Higgs production at RHIC and the positivity of the gluon helicity distribution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10814

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