Soft-gluon Effects in Polarized Prompt Photon Production

Werner Vogelsang

We present a study of spin asymmetries for prompt photon production in collisions of longitudinally polarized protons at BNL-RHIC. This reaction will be a key tool for determining the gluon spin density in a polarized proton. We focus in particular on the role higher-order QCD corrections are expected to play in this context. Here, we address next-to-leading order corrections as well as all-order soft-gluon resummations. We study theoretical uncertainties, such as the dependence of the predictions on the factorization and renormalization scales. We also address the issue of isolation cuts on the photon.