Quark sea in nuclei and its effects in drell-yan processes

Abstract

The sea of quark-antiquark pairs arising from the interactions between the nucleons within the target nucleus leads to important consequences in a hard-scattering process. We have investigated the implications of such a quark sea for inclusive reactions involving massive dimuons initiated by hadrons off nuclei, assuming the validity of the Drell-Yan model. Besides the dependence on the variables x_F and (m²/s), the exponent α is expected to depend on the beam type and also on the specific nuclei used as targets.