We present an analysis of unpolarized Drell-Yan pair production in pion-nucleus scattering with a particular focus into the pion dynamics. The study consists in analyzing the effect of the partonic longitudinal and, especially, transverse distributions of the pion in a Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) framework, with Pauli-Villars regularization. In order to consistently take into account the QCD evolution effects, we have estimated the hadronic scale corresponding to the NJL models degrees of freedom through a minimization procedure at NLO: The NLO evolved pion distributions have been compared to rapidity differential Drell-Yan cross sections data. That hadronic scale so determined represents the only free parameter in our approach. The NJL transverse momentum PDF, evolved up to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, is then tested against the transverse momentum spectrum of dilepton pairs up to a transverse momentum of 2 GeV. We found a fair agreement with available pion-nucleus data. We find sizable evolution effects on the shape of the distributions and on the generated average transverse momentum of the dilepton pair.
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