Monte Carlo simulation of events with Drell-Yan lepton pairs from antiproton-proton collisions: the fully polarized case

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the study of Drell-Yan processes with antiproton beams already presented in a previous work. We consider the fully polarized $\bar{p}^\uparrow p^\uparrow \to μ^+ μ^- X$ process, because this is the simplest scenario for extracting the transverse spin distribution of quarks, or transversity, which is the missing piece to complete the knowledge of the nucleon spin structure at leading twist. We perform Monte Carlo simulations for transversely polarized antiproton and proton beams colliding at a center-of-mass energy of interest for the future HESR at GSI. The goal is to possibly establish feasibility conditions for an unambiguous extraction of the transversity from data on double spin asymmetries.