Nuclear parton distributions and the Drell-Yan process

Abstract

We study the nuclear parton distribution functions on the basis of our recently developed semi-microscopic model, which takes into account a number of nuclear effects including nuclear shadowing, Fermi motion and nuclear binding, nuclear meson-exchange currents, and off-shell corrections to bound nucleon distributions. We discuss in detail the dependencies of nuclear effects on the type of parton distribution (nuclear sea vs valence), as well as on the parton flavor (isospin). We apply the resulting nuclear parton distributions to calculate ratios of cross sections for proton-induced Drell-Yan production off different nuclear targets. We obtain a good agreement on the magnitude, target and projectile $x$, and the dimuon mass dependence of proton-nucleus Drell-Yan process data from the E772 and E866 experiments at Fermilab. We also provide nuclear corrections for the Drell-Yan data from the E605 experiment.

34 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Final version to appear in Phys. Rev. C

References in corpus (8)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• EPS09 - a New Generation of NLO and LO Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions
• Probing Cold Dense Nuclear Matter
• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Isovector EMC effect explains the NuTeV anomaly
• Neutrino inclusive inelastic scattering off nuclei
• Fixed target Drell-Yan data and NNLO QCD fits of parton distribution functions
• Spin structure functions of 3He at finite Q^2

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Determination of Strange Sea Quark Distributions from Fixed-target and Collider Data
• Study of W and Z Boson Production in Proton-Lead Collisions at the LHC with KP Nuclear Parton Distributions
• Comparison of the Structure Function F2 as Measured by Charged Lepton and Neutrino Scattering from Iron Targets
• Application of the rescaling model at small Bjorken $x$ values
• Modelling the nuclear parton distributions