The color dipole approach to the Drell-Yan process in pA collisions

Abstract

In the target rest frame and at high energies, Drell-Yan (DY) dilepton production looks like bremsstrahlung of massive photons, rather than parton annihilation. The projectile quark is decomposed into a series of Fock states. Configurations with fixed transverse separations are interaction eigenstates for pp scattering. The DY cross section can then be expressed in terms of the same color dipole cross section as DIS. This approach is especially suitable to describe nuclear effects, since it allows to apply Glauber multiple scattering theory. We go beyond the Glauber eikonal approximation by taking into account transitions between interaction eigenstates. We calculate nuclear shadowing at large Feynman-x_F for DY in proton-nucleus collisions, compare to existing data from E772 and make predictions for RHIC. Nuclear effects on the transverse momentum distribution are also investigated.