Analysis of weak-interaction effects in high energy hadron-hadron collisions.

Parity-violating (pv) effects in inclusive hadron and jet productions in high energy hadronhadron collisions are analyzed. Such effects arise from the interference between strong and weak amplitudes. This interference gives rise to a nonzero value of the pv parameters AL and PL, where AL measures the difference in the inclusive cross sections of, for example, p + p → jet +X (X=anything), with one of incident proton beams in a state of ± helicity, and PL denotes the longitudinal polarization of a high-energy baryon (e.g., Λ) produced in p + p → Λ +X with the initial proton beams unpolarized. In the present paper, the single helicity asymmetry AL in one-jet, two-jet and two-jet plus photon productions as well as in the Drell-Yan process p + p → ll + jet +X is probed, and the longitudinal polarization PL of the Λ produced in unpolarized pp collisions is studied. We conclude that the pv effects in high energy proton-proton collisions are in general only sensitive to the spin dependent valence quark distributions.