Antiproton--Proton Scattering Experiments with Polarization

The document describes the physics case of the PAX experiment using polarized antiprotons, which has recently been proposed for the new Facility for Antiprotons and Ions Research (FAIR) at GSI--Darmstadt. Polarized antiprotons provide access to a wealth of single-- and double--spin observables, thereby opening a new window to physics uniquely accessible at the HESR. The polarized antiprotons would be most efficiently produced by spin--filtering in a dedicated Antiproton Polarizer Ring (APR) using an internal polarized hydrogen gas target. In the proposed collider scenario of the PAX experiment, polarized protons stored in a COSY--like Cooler Storage Ring (CSR) up to momenta of 3.5 GeV/c are bombarded head--on with 15 GeV/c polarized antiprotons stored in the HESR. This asymmetric double--polarized antiproton--proton collider is ideally suited to map, e.g., the transversity distribution in the proton. The proposed detector consists of a large--angle apparatus optimized for the detection of Drell--Yan electron pairs.