Phenomenological model for the Drell-Yan process: Reexamined

TL;DR

This paper reexamines a phenomenological model of Drell-Yan pair production, highlighting differences from the standard parton model due to unphysical solutions and proposing a method to address them.

Contribution

It provides a revised approach to the naive parton model for Drell-Yan processes, including full quark kinematics and a prescription to handle unphysical solutions.

Findings

Differences identified between naive and standard parton models.

Unphysical solutions arise in full kinematic calculations.

A prescription is proposed to avoid misleading results.

Abstract

Drell-Yan pair production is investigated. We reexamine a model where the quark momentum fraction is defined as the ratio of the corresponding light cone components of the quark and parent nucleon in a naive parton-model approach. It is shown that results differ from the standard parton model. This is due to unphysical solutions for the momentum fractions within the naive approach which are not present in the standard parton model. In a calculation employing full quark kinematics, i.e. including primordial quark transverse momentum, these solutions also appear. A prescription is given to handle these solutions in order to avoid misleading results. The impact of these solutions in the full kinematical approach is demonstrated and compared to the modified result.