Study of the Drell-Yan process with the pair-production of polarized tau leptons in collisions of polarized proton beams

Abstract

The new method for studying polarized parton distribution functions via the Drell-Yan process with tau production is proposed. The hadronic decay of tau to single charged pi-meson and neutrino is utilised for determination of the polarization state of the tau-lepton. The key feature of our approach is that we do not sum over the polarizations states of tau, but preserve this information through energies ofpions produced in corresponding decays. The new method in addition to existing ones should improve the accuracy of measurements of polarized structure functions of hadrons. In the current work, the feasibility of such an approach is assessed through numerical simulations.