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arXiv · 1401.0934

Novel Phenomenology of Parton Distributions from the Drell-Yan Process

Abstract

The Drell-Yan massive lepton-pair production in hadronic collisions provides a unique tool complementary to the Deep-Inelastic Scattering for probing the partonic substructures in hadrons. We review key concepts, approximations, and progress for QCD factorization of the Drell-Yan process in terms of collinear or transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions. We present experimental results from recent fixed-target Drell-Yan as well as $W$ and $Z$ boson production at colliders, focussing on the topics of flavor structure of the nucleon sea as well as the extraction of novel Sivers and Boer-Mulders functions via single transverse spin asymmetries and azimuthal lepton angular distribution of the Drell-Yan process. Prospects for future Drell-Yan experiments are also presented.

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Jen-Chieh Peng, Jian-Wei Qiu. 2014-01-05. Novel Phenomenology of Parton Distributions from the Drell-Yan Process. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ppnp.2014.01.005

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