Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Nuclear Effects in the Proton-Deuteron Drell-Yan Reaction

Student: Peter Ehlers

School: University of Minnesota

Mentored By: Wally Melnitchouk

Scattering experiments using a deuteron target, composed of one proton and one neutron, are currently the simplest way of studying the internal structure of the neutron. The internal structure can be revealed by examining scattering cross sections for certain reactions using deuteron targets. One such reaction is the Drell-Yan process, where a quark and an antiquark for different hadrons annihilate and produce a lepton-antilepton pair. One can express the proton-deuteron (pD) cross section in terms of the proton-nucleon cross sections as well as the momentum distribution of the nucleons in the deuteron, called the smearing function. For this project, an expression for the smearing function of the pD cross section in the Drell-Yan process was obtained while making as few approximations as possible. The results from this project will allow more accurate computation of the pD Drell-Yan cross section, which is especially necessary for lower energy collisions.