Effects of Shadowing on Drell Yan Dilepton Production in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

We compute cross sections for the Drell–Yan process in nuclear collisions at next-to-leading order (NLO) in αs. The effects of shadowing on the normalization and on the mass and rapidity dependence of these cross sections are presented. An estimate of higher order corrections is obtained from next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) calculation of the rapidity-integrated mass distribution. Variations in these predictions resulting from choices of parton distributions sets are discussed. Numerical results for mass distributions at NLO are presented for RHIC and LHC energies, using appropriate rapidity intervals. The shadowing factors in the dilepton mass range 2 < M < 10 GeV are predicted to be substantial, typically 0.5 - 0.7 at LHC, 0.7 - 0.9 at RHIC, and approximately independent of the choice of parton distribution sets and the order of calculation.