Longitudinally polarized photoproduction of inclusive hadrons beyond the leading order

Abstract

We present a complete next-to-leading order QCD calculation for single-inclusive large-p(T) hadron production in longitudinally polarized lepton-nucleon collisions, consistently including "direct" and "resolved" photon contributions. This process could be studied experimentally at a future polarized lepton-proton collider such as eRHIC at BNL. We examine the sensitivity of such measurements to the so far completely unknown parton content of circularly polarized photons.