Polarization of the gluon field has attracted considerable attention, in connection with the axial anomaly, as a possible source of the ``missing'' spin of the proton. A variety of models have been published on the subject of gluon polarization[31,32,33,34].
Quarkonium[35,36,37] production and open heavy-flavor production[37] have both been considered as possible means for the delineation of gluon polarization effects. The advantages of heavy quark production are its large cross section and surprisingly large parton-level asymmetries. Quarkonium production has the further merit that its decay width to dimuons is large and easily detectable.
In general one can write,
where is the parton level asymmetry for the particular gluon fusion process.