On the determination of the polarized sea distributions of the nucleon

The possibilities to determine the flavor structure of the polarized sea (antiquark) distributions of the nucleon via vector boson production at high energy polarized hadron–hadron colliders, such as the Relativistic Heavy–Ion Collider (RHIC), are studied in detail. In particular the perturbative stability of the expected asymmetries in two representative models for the (un)broken flavor structure are investigated by confronting perturbative QCD leading order predictions of the expected asymmetries with their next–to–leading order counterparts. Received: 28 November 2000 / Published online: 5 February 2001