Jet Production in Polarized Lepton-hadron Scattering

We calculate exact analytical expressions for O(αs) 3-jet and O(α2 s) 4-jet cross sections in polarized deep inelastic lepton nucleon scattering. Introducing an invariant jet definition scheme, we present differential distributions of 3and 4-jet cross sections in the basic kinematical variables x and W 2 as well as total jet cross sections and show their dependence on the chosen spin-dependent (polarized) parton distributions. Noticebly differences in the predictions are found for the two extreme choices, i.e. a large negative sea-quark density or a large positive gluon density. Therefore, it may be possible to discriminate between different parametrizations of polarized parton densities, and hence between the different physical pictures of the proton spin underlying these parametrizations.