Nuclear effects in the Drell-Yan process

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 in impact parameter space are interaction eigenstates for proton-proton (pp) scattering. The DY cross section can then be expressed in terms of the same color dipole cross section as DIS. We compare calculations in this dipole approach with E772 data and with next-to-leading order parton model calculations. This approach is especially suitable to describe nuclear effects, since it allows one to apply Glauber multiple scattering theory. We go beyond the Glauber eikonal approximation by taking into account transitions between states, which would be eigenstates for a proton target. We calculate nuclear shadowing at large Feynman-x for DY in proton-nucleus collisions and compare to E772 data. Nuclear effects on the transverse momentum distribution are also investigated.