Absolute Drell-Yan Dimuon Cross Sections in 800 GeV/c pp and pd Collisions
hep-ex
/ Authors
FNAL E866/NuSea Collaboration, :, J. C. Webb, T. C. Awes, M. L. Brooks, C. N. Brown, J. D. Bush, T. A. Carey, T. H. Chang, W. E. Cooper
and 32 more authors
C. A. Gagliardi, G. T. Garvey, D. F. Geesaman, E. A. Hawker, X. C. He, L. D. Isenhower, D. M. Kaplan, S. B. Kaufman, D. D. Koetke, D. M. Lee, W. M. Lee, M. J. Leitch, N. Makins, P. L. McGaughey, J. M. Moss, B. A. Mueller, P. M. Nord, V. Papavassiliou, B. K. Park, J. C. Peng, G. Petitt, P. E. Reimer, M. E. Sadler
/ Abstract
The Fermilab E866/NuSea Collaboration has measured the Drell-Yan dimuon cross sections in 800 GeV/$c$ $pp$ and $pd$ collisions. This represents the first measurement of the Drell-Yan cross section in $pp$ collisions over a broad kinematic region and the most extensive study to date of the Drell-Yan cross section in $pd$ collisions. The results indicate that recent global parton distribution fits provide a good description of the light antiquark sea in the nucleon over the Bjorken-$x$ range $0.03 \lesssim x < 0.15$, but overestimate the valence quark distributions as $x \to 1$.