skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Massive muon pair production in 400 GeV proton-nucleus collisions

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:5231604

The process p + N ..-->.. ..mu../sup +/ + ..mu../sup -/ + X with incident 400 GeV protons at FNAL in a high intensity, broad acceptance, low resolution experiment was investigated. We measure the cross section for the production of muon pairs with invariant mass up to 16 GeV. The data contain 225,000 events with invariant mass exceeding 6 GeV. Feynman X distributions are measured from slightly negative values to the kinematic limit in the forward direction. We confirm the existence of the UPSILON. We extract the nucleon sea quark structure functions from the data near X/sub f/ = 0 assuming the Drell-Yan model. We then compare the Drell-Yan prediction to our data over all positive X/sub f/ and find excellent agreement providing a significant new confirmation of the Drell-Yan model. We measure the QCD correction factor to the Drell-Yan model and find it to be 1.6 +- 0.3 in agreement with first order QCD.

Research Organization:
Washington Univ., Seattle (USA)
OSTI ID:
5231604
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English