Polarisation of quarks and gluons inside the nucleon

Overview & Synopsis

The work presented in this thesis is related to the study of the longitudinal spin structure of the nucleon. The aim is to determine the contribution to the spin 1/2 of the proton in terms of its constituents, quarks and gluons. The analysis is performed on the data taken with the COMPASS experiment, which benefits from a polarised muon beam at 200 GeV scattered off polarised protons from an ammonia target of 1.2 m long. The double longitudinal spin asymmetry of deep inelastic scattering cross-Section. The spin-Dependent structure function of the proton g₁p is derived from these measurements, which extend the kinematic world coverage to unexplored region so far (0,0036 < x< 0,57; 1,03 < Q² (GeV/c)² < 96 and 23 < W² (GeV/c)² < 320).The results obtained with a high statistical precision are included in a Next-To-Leading order QCD analysis of world g₁p, g₁d and g₁n (proton, deuteron and neutron) data to parametrise the polarised quark and gluon distributions. The g₁ world coverage of the x and Q² kinematic domain, which is a key point in the sensitivity to the gluon polarisation ΔG, turns out to be too limited for an accurate ΔG determination. Nevertheless, the QCD analysis allows to determine the quark spin contributions to the proton spin to 0.26