Probing Polarized Gluon Distributions through Charmed Hadron Production in Polarized pp Collisions at BNL--RHIC Energy

In order to extract information about behavior of polarized gluons in the nucleon, charmed hadron productions, i.e. D* meson and Lambda_c baryon productions, are studied in polarized pp reactions at BNL-RHIC energy. For these processes, the spin correlation asymmetry D_{LL} between the target proton and the produced charmed hadron, and its statistical sensitivity delta D_{LL} are calculated. From analyses on these processes, we found that the pseudo-rapidity distribution of D_{LL} in the limited transverse momentum region is quite effective for distinguishing the model of polarized gluons as well as the model of spin-dependent fragmentation functions.