Next-to-leading order transverse momentum broadening for Drell-Yan production in p+A collisions

Abstract

We present the nuclear transverse momentum broadening for Drell-Yan lepton pair production in p+A collisions at next-to-leading order (NLO) in powers of strong coupling constant $\alpha_s$. We verify that the transverse momentum weighted differential cross section in NLO perturbative QCD (pQCD) at twist-4 can be factorized into the convolution of parton distribution function of an active parton in the projectile proton, a twist-4 multiparton correlation function of the target nucleus, and perturbatively calculable hard coefficient function. We identify a QCD evolution equation for such a twist-4 nuclear gluon-quark correlation function, and verify its universality -- its process independence. This finding demonstrates the prediction power of pQCD factorization approach for studying parton multiple scattering in nuclear medium.