UC Riverside

The measurement of transverse single spin asymmetries provides insight into the structure of the nucleon. Originally expected to be small, results from PHENIX and other experiments show significant asymmetries in the forward momentum direction of the polarized proton over a wide range of center-of-mass energies. Several mechanisms have been proposed that attempt to explain these asymmetries, which include initial and final state effects based on transverse momentum dependent distributions and perturbative Quantum Chromodynamic (pQCD) calculations at higher twist. Studying the species, and the kinematic dependencies of these transverse single spin asymmetries will help to disentangle the origin of the observed asymmetries. Using the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the transverse single spin asymmetry (A_N) of inclusive eta mesons produced from transversely polarized proton-proton collisions at center of mass energy of 200~GeV at forward rapidity is measured. In addition, the predictive power of pQCD to explain this asymmetry is tested via the measurement of the eta meson Cross Section.