The STAR experiment

We're using an afterburner framework that turns Pythia into something like a LO polarized event generator to study any biases introduced by our triggers on A_LL measurements.  This page compares the asymmetries generated by Pythia to theoretical predictions from GRSV.

Cuts

• MC and reco vz positions inside 60 cm
• |eta| of reco primary track < 1.0
• dca of associated global < 1.0
• fit points > 25
• select pions using geant ID 8 (pi-plus) or 9 (pi-minus)

No trigger requirements are imposed.

Weighting

I combined MC samples 3_4 through 55_65 using the following cross sections and event counts

Plots

First off, here are the asymmetries integrated over all subprocesses.  The left column is pi-plus, the right column is pi-minus.  The agreement for postive charges seems basically acceptable to me, but pi-minus is off by quite a lot:

If I restrict to g-g, q-g, and q-q subprocesses individually, the difference between the two is obviously in the q-g subprocess contribution (as expected):

It seems to me that the lack of agreement between our Monte Carlo and the theoretical predictions could be due in part to a lack of gg / over-abundance of qg in the subprocess mix.  Here are plots of the subprocess mix from Pythia:

compare that to the prediction from Vogelsang et al. for inclusive pi0 production, where gg is the primary contributor until ~3 GeV:

In particular, only the 3_4 GeV partonic sample has more g-g than q-g at any pion p_T.  I'm going to try including the 2_3 GeV sample in my studies and see if that bolsters the gg contribution.