On the determination of the polarized sea distributions of the nucleon

The possibilities to determine the flavor structure of the polarized sea (a ntiquark) distributions of the nucleon via vector boson (gamma*, W+/-, Z(0) ) production at high energy polarized hadron-hadron colliders, such as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC), are studied in detail. In particula r the perturbative stability of the expected asymmetries in two representat ive models for the (un)broken flavor structure are investigated by confront ing perturbative QCD leading order predictions of the expected asymmetries with their next-to-leading order counterparts.