Nuclear parton distributions and the Drell-Yan process

TL;DR

This paper develops a semi-microscopic model for nuclear parton distribution functions, incorporating various nuclear effects, and applies it to analyze Drell-Yan process data, achieving good agreement with experimental results.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive semi-microscopic model for nuclear PDFs that accounts for multiple nuclear effects and applies it to Drell-Yan processes, improving data interpretation.

Findings

Good agreement with Fermilab Drell-Yan data

Nuclear effects vary with parton type and flavor

Provides nuclear corrections for E605 data

Abstract

We study the nuclear parton distribution functions on the basis of our recently developed semi-microscopic model, which takes into account a number of nuclear effects including nuclear shadowing, Fermi motion and nuclear binding, nuclear meson-exchange currents, and off-shell corrections to bound nucleon distributions. We discuss in detail the dependencies of nuclear effects on the type of parton distribution (nuclear sea vs valence), as well as on the parton flavor (isospin). We apply the resulting nuclear parton distributions to calculate ratios of cross sections for proton-induced Drell-Yan production off different nuclear targets. We obtain a good agreement on the magnitude, target and projectile $x$, and the dimuon mass dependence of proton-nucleus Drell-Yan process data from the E772 and E866 experiments at Fermilab. We also provide nuclear corrections for the Drell-Yan data from the E605 experiment.