The Transverse Structure of the Deuteron with Drell-Yan at SpinQuest

This talk discusses the proposed measurement of the neutron and deuteron transversity TMDs at the Fermilab SpinQuest experiment. The quark transversity distributions are decoupled from the deuteron gluon transversity in the Q² evolution due to the chiral-odd property in the transversely-polarized target. The gluon transversity TMD only exists for targets of spin greater or equal to 1 and does not mix with quark distributions at leading twist, thereby providing a particularly clean probe of gluonic degrees of freedom. This experiment would be the first of its kind and would probe the gluonic structure of the deuteron, investigating exotic glue contributions in the nucleus not associated with individual nucleons. This experiment can be performed with the SpinQuest polarized target at Fermilab. This new experiment would require a specialized RF-driven solid-state target system

to align the spins to probe linearly polarized gluons. Dedicated beam time with this novel target system is required to achieve these new physics goals at SpinQuest.