Measuring the anti-quark contribution to the proton spin using parity violating W production in polarized proton proton collisions

The W⁺→e⁺  measurement present in this work has been performed with the PHENIX central arm detectors at √s = 510GeV at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The measurement in this thesis has obtained for the first time a confirmation of large parity violating asymmetries at a level of 2.8σ and 1.8σ away from 0 for the W⁺ and W⁻ respectively.