Low mass Drell-Yan production of lepton pairs at forward directions at the LHC: a hybrid approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid approach to Drell-Yan dilepton production at high energies, highlighting its advantages over dipole models and providing detailed cross section calculations relevant for LHC experiments.

Contribution

It develops a hybrid high-energy approach using unintegrated gluon distributions and collinear quark/antiquark distributions, improving accuracy over dipole models for forward rapidity regions.

Findings

Hybrid approach aligns well with LHC data for low-mass dileptons.

Dipole approximation is only valid at extremely forward rapidities beyond current experimental reach.

No clear evidence of gluon saturation effects at small invariant masses.

Abstract

We discuss Drell-Yan production of dileptons at high energies in forward rapidity region in a hybrid high-energy approach. This approach uses unintegrated gluon distributions in one proton and collinear quark/antiquark distributions in the second proton. Corresponding momentum-space formula for the differential cross sections in high-energy approximation has been derived and will be presented. The relation to the commonly used dipole approach is discussed. We conclude and illustrate that some results of the dipole approaches are too approximate, as far as kinematics is considered, and in fact cannot be used when comparing with real experimental data. We find that the dipole formula is valid only in very forward/backward rapidity regions ($|y| >$ 5) that cannot be studied experimentally in the moment. We performed calculations of some differential cross sections for low-mass dilepton production by the LHCb and ATLAS collaborations. In distinction to most of dipole approaches, we include all of the four Drell-Yan structure functions, although the impact of interference structure functions is rather small for the relevant experimental cuts. We find that both side contributions ($g + q/\bar q$ and $q/\bar q + g$) have to be included even for the LHCb rapidity coverage which is in contradiction with what is usually done in the dipole approach. We present results for different unintegrated gluon distributions from the literature (some of them include saturation effects). We see no clear hints of saturation even at small $M_{ll}$ when comparing with the LHCb data.