No Arabic abstract
We show that for Drell-Yan events by unpolarized hadronic projectiles and nuclear targets, azimuthal asymmetries can arise from the nuclear distortion of the hadronic projectile wave function, typically a spin-orbit effect occurring on the nuclear surface. The asymmetry depends on quantities that enter also the spin asymmetry in the corresponding Drell-Yan event on polarized free nucleonic targets. Hence, this study can be of help in exploring the spin structure of the nucleon, in particular the transverse spin distribution of partons inside the proton. All arguments can be extended also to antinucleon projectiles and, consequently, apply to possible future measurements involving nuclear targets at the foreseen HESR ring at GSI.
We consider the azimuthal distribution of the final observed hadron in semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering and the lepton pair in the Drell-Yan process. In particular, we focus on the $cos phi$ modulation of the unpolarized cross section and on its dependence upon transverse momentum. At low transverse momentum, for these observables we propose a factorized expression based on tree-level approach and conjecture that the same formula is valid in transverse-momentum dependent (TMD) factorization when written in terms of subtracted TMD parton distributions. Our formula correctly matches with the collinear factorization results at high transverse momentum, solves a long-standing problem and is a necessary step towards the extension of the TMD factorization theorems up to the subleading twist.
We estimate the energy losses in the cases of J/Psi and l^+l^- pair production on nuclear targets in terms of effective change of the initial beam energy. Our phenomenological results are in reasonable agreement with Theoretical calculations.
The first measurement of transverse-spin-dependent azimuthal asymmetries in the pion-induced Drell-Yan (DY) process is reported. We use the CERN SPS 190 GeV/$c$, $pi^{-}$ beam and a transversely polarized ammonia target. Three azimuthal asymmetries giving access to different transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions (PDFs) are extracted using dimuon events with invariant mass between 4.3 GeV/$c^2$ and 8.5 GeV/$c^2$. The observed sign of the Sivers asymmetry is found to be consistent with the fundamental prediction of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that the Sivers TMD PDFs extracted from DY have a sign opposite to the one extracted from semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering (SIDIS) data. We present two other asymmetries originating from the pion Boer-Mulders TMD PDFs convoluted with either the nucleon transversity or pretzelosity TMD PDFs. These DY results are obtained at a hard scale comparable to that of a recent COMPASS SIDIS measurement and hence allow unique tests of fundamental QCD universality predictions.
We present a new analysis of the E772 and E866 experiments on the nuclear dependence of Drell-Yan (DY) lepton pair production resulting from the bombardment of $^2H$, Be, C, Ca, Fe, and W targets by 800 GeV/c protons at Fermilab. We employ a light-cone formulation of the DY reaction in the rest frame of the nucleus, where the dimuons detected at small values of Bjorken x_2 << 1 may be considered to originate from the decay of a heavy photon radiated from an incident quark in a bremsstrahlung process. We infer the energy loss of the quark by examining the suppression of the nuclear-dependent DY ratios seen as a function of projectile momentum fraction x_1 and dimuon mass M. Shadowing, which also leads to nuclear suppression of dimuons, is calculated within the same approach employing the results of phenomenological fits to deep inelastic scattering data from HERA. The analysis yields -dE/dz =2.73 +/- 0.37 +/- 0.5 GeV/fm for the rate of quark energy loss per unit path length, a value consistent with theoretical expectations including the effects of the inelastic interaction of the incident proton at the surface of the nucleus. This is the first observation of a nonzero energy loss effect in such experiments.
We study double spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes in which one initial hadron is transversely polarized and another one is longitudinally polarized. The complete part of the hadronic tensor relevant to asymmetries is derived. This part consists of twist-2 and twist-3 parton distributions and is gauge invariant. We construct some observables which can be used to extract these parton distributions from experimental measurements.