On lepton pair production in proton-antiproton collisions at intermediate energies and the main backgrounds

TL;DR

This paper investigates lepton pair production in proton-antiproton collisions at intermediate energies, focusing on background processes and event selection strategies to aid detector design and proton structure studies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of lepton pair signals and backgrounds, proposing cuts to improve event identification for the PANDA experiment.

Findings

Identification of key kinematic variables for detector design.

Strategies to suppress background from meson decays and QCD processes.

Proposed event selection cuts to isolate lepton pairs.

Abstract

The lepton pair production via the quark-antiquark annihilation subprocess in collisions of beam antiproton with the proton target at E_beam = 14 GeV (which corresponds to the center-of-mass energy of the p pbar system E_cm = 5.3 GeV) is studied on the basis of the event sample simulated by PYTHIA6 generator and PandaRoot package. Different kinematical variables which may be useful for design of the muon system and the electromagnetic calorimeter of the detector of PANDA experiment at FAIR, as well as for the study of proton structure functions in the available x-Q2 kinematical region, are considered. The problems due to the presence of fake leptons that appear from meson decays, as well as due to the contribution of background QCD processes and minimum bias events, are also discussed. The set of cuts which allows one to separate the events with the signal lepton pairs from different kind of background events are proposed.