Diffractive Drell-Yan process: hard or soft?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nature of the diffractive Drell-Yan process in high-energy hadron collisions, focusing on the interplay between hard and soft QCD interactions and their impact on observable cross sections.

Contribution

It provides theoretical predictions for diffractive Drell-Yan cross sections using the color dipole approach, highlighting the soft-hard interaction interplay.

Findings

Predicted total and differential cross sections at various energies.

Identified energy and scale dependence of QCD factorization breaking.

Analyzed the role of soft and hard interactions in diffractive processes.

Abstract

Single diffractive Drell-Yan reaction in hadron-hadron collisions is considered as an important source of information on the properties of soft QCD interactions. In particular, it provides an access to the dynamics of the QCD factorisation breaking due to the interplay between hard and soft interactions which leads to a nontrivial energy and scale dependence of the Drell-Yan observables. We study the process at forward rapidities in high energy proton-(anti)proton collisions in the color dipole approach. Predictions for the total and differential cross sections of the diffractive lepton pair production are given at different energies.