Description of fully differential Drell-Yan pair production

TL;DR

This paper develops a QCD-inspired model for Drell-Yan pair production that accurately reproduces experimental spectra across various energies without K-factors, incorporating phenomenological parton distributions and a subtraction scheme.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining phenomenological parton distributions with a subtraction scheme to improve fixed order calculations of Drell-Yan processes.

Findings

Successfully reproduces experimental spectra across multiple experiments and energies.

Predicts low-energy Drell-Yan spectra for future measurements at PANDA.

Eliminates the need for K-factors in modeling Drell-Yan 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.