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Drell-Yan Production of Lepton Pairs

The Drell-Yan production of lepton pairs has been studied for two decades and regarded as a useful probe of the hadron structure. In this process quark and anti-quark annihilate into massive off-shell photon and the photon decays into lepton pairs. The subprocess has the maximum analyzing power,

Thus the asymmetry for Drell-Yan process is written as

where a denotes the quark flavor, and represents electric charge of flavor a, and the helicity distribution anti-quark can be determined. The asymmetry is the weighted sum of the and assuming strange and other heavy quark contribution to the asymmetry is small. The weight for the is higher than that for the due to its electric charge and its abundance. Thus the asymmetry for Drell-Yan production of lepton pairs will provide an information on the polarization which is contaminated by the polarization.



Naohito Saito
July 3, 1996