The energy loss effect of incoming quark in the Drell-Yan reaction off nuclei

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy loss of incoming quarks in nuclear Drell-Yan reactions using BDMPS formalism, extracting a transport coefficient that aligns well with experimental data and improves understanding of quark energy loss effects.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic parameterization of quenching weights based on BDMPS formalism to analyze nuclear Drell-Yan data and extracts the quark energy loss transport coefficient from experimental results.

Findings

Transport coefficient $q=0.37\u00b10.05$ GeV$^{2}$/fm

Predictions agree well with NA3 and E866 data

Energy loss effect is significant at lower proton energies

Abstract

By means of the analytic parameterizations of quenching weights based on BDMPS formalism, the leading-order computations for nuclear Drell-Yan differential cross section rations as a function of the quark momentum fraction are performed with the nuclear geometry effect in Drell-Yan dimuon production. The transport coefficient of the incoming quark energy loss in cold nuclear matter is extracted with a global analysis of the experimental data from NA3 and E866 collaborations. The extracted transport coefficient with the analytic parameterizations of BDMPS quenching weights is $\hat{q}=0.37\pm0.05$ GeV$^{2}$/fm. It is found that our predictions are in good agrement with the experimental measurements, and especially the agreement of calculations with NA3 experimental data has a significant improvement. The comparison of the theoretical results and the corresponding experimental data demonstrates intuitively that the energy loss effect of incoming quark is particularly significant at lower incident proton energies. It is hoped that the obtained results relevant to the NA3 experiment ($E_{beam}=150$ GeV) can provide useful reference for the forthcoming E906 Sea Quest experiment ($E_{beam}=120$ GeV).