Description of fully differential Drell-Yan pair production

Abstract

We investigate Drell-Yan pair production in a QCD inspired model, which takes into account all relevant hard processes up to $O({\alpha }_s)$. To address the known shortfalls of such a fixed order calculation we introduce phenomenological parton distributions for initial transverse momentum and quark mass, and devise a subtraction scheme to avoid double-counting when utilizing the standard longitudinal parton distribution functions. We show that we can reproduce Drell-Yan transverse momentum and invariant mass spectra from different proton-proton, proton-nucleus and antiproton-nucleus experiments and at different energies without the need for a $K$ factor. Fixing our parameters at these spectra, we make predictions for Drell-Yan transverse momentum spectra at low hadronic energies, which will be measured for example at $\bar{\text{P}}$ANDA in antiproton-proton collisions.

34 pages, 37 figures