Probing Nucleon Spin Structure with a Polarized Gamma Beam from Compton Backscattering at FCC-ee

Abstract

We present the design of a high-energy polarized gamma-ray facility based on Compton backscattering (CBS) of laser pulses off the FCC-ee full-energy booster beams in the Z, WW, ZH and $t\bar{t}$ modes. Saturating the safe value of the kinematic parameter $\kappa=4.35$ fixes the laser wavelength in each mode and yields backscattered photons up to $\omega_{\max}=148$ GeV. The conversion point operates on the booster cycle structure: fully parasitically on the 0.1 s top-up flat-tops ($f_{\rm CBS}=10^{-8}$ per bunch crossing, cumulative electron loss $3\times10^{-6}$ per cycle) or, as the baseline, in dedicated extended-flat-top fills inside the idle windows between top-up cycles ($f_{\rm CBS}=10^{-6}$, beam loss below 1% per cycle). The collider luminosity is unaffected in both scenarios, and the operational laser pulse energies lie in the sub-millijoule to few-millijoule range. Photon selection is performed event-by-event with a pair spectrometer on the high-energy Compton edge; for the unpolarized booster beam the Compton polarization transfer limits the achievable band-averaged circular polarization, and the selection is set to $|\langle S_2\rangle|=0.90$. We project the sensitivity to the polarized gluon distribution $\Delta g(x)$ via open-charm photoproduction $\gamma p\to c\bar{c}X$ on an NH$_3$ dynamically polarized target, including NLO QCD corrections via K-factors and propagating polarized-PDF uncertainties through the 100 Monte Carlo replicas of NNPDFpol2.0. The projected total precision is $\delta(\Delta g/g)_{\rm tot}\simeq 1.8$-$3.0\times10^{-2}$, a factor of 4-7 below the total uncertainty of the most precise existing direct measurement (HERMES), at four values of $\langle x\rangle$ in the medium-$x$ region $0.07\le x\le 0.19$. The facility would set the dominant constraint on $\Delta g$ in this region, complementary to the low-$x$ reach of the Electron-Ion Collider.