QCD CORRECTIONS TO DOUBLE AND SINGLE SPIN ASYMMETRIES IN VECTOR BOSONPRODUCTION AT POLARIZED HADRON COLLIDERS

The production of W+/- and Z(0) bosons in collisions of longitudinally polarized protons allows one to access various combinations of the po larized quark distributions from the study of double and single spin a symmetries. We compute the O(alpha(s)) corrections to these asymmetrie s as function of the vector boson rapidity y in the hadron-hadron cent re-of-mass frame. Detailed studies of the numerical impact of the next -to-leading order corrections are presented. The theoretical uncertain ties of an extraction of polarized quark distributions from future vec tor boson production data are investigated in detail. (C) 1998 Elsevie r Science B.V.