Soft parton radiation in polarized vector boson production: theoretical issues

Accurate measurement of spin-dependent parton distributions in production of electroweak bosons with polarized proton beams at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider depends on good understanding of QCD radiation at small transverse momenta q(T) Of vector bosons. We present a theoretical formalism for small-q(T) resummation of the cross sections for production of gamma*, W+/-, and Z(0) bosons, with the subsequent decay of these bosons into lepton pairs, for arbitrary longitudinal polarizations of the proton beams. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.