Drell–Yan process

The Drell - Yan process is a hadron - hadron scattering process in high-energy physics. One understands here by mutual annihilation of a quark from a hadron with an antiquark from another hadron to form a virtual photon or Z boson, which subsequently opposed to a pair of charged leptons decays.

It was first proposed in 1970 by Sidney Drell and Tung- Mow Yan, to describe the production of lepton pairs antilepton in high-energy collisions of hadrons. Experimentally, this process was first described by JH Christenson et al. observed in the synchrotron proton - uranium collisions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Alternating Gradient.

Overview

The Drell -Yan process provides important information about the parton distribution functions, which are an integral part of the calculation and prediction of all processes in hadron accelerators. So far it has not been possible to calculate the parton distribution functions directly, but only to determine it experimentally at accelerators.

The production of Z bosons in the Drell -Yan process offers the possibility of the couplings, ie to investigate the interaction strength of the Z boson to quarks. The most important observation variable is the forward-backward asymmetry in the angular distribution of the two leptons produced in their center of mass system.

If heavier neutral gauge bosons such as Z ' boson exist, they could be detected as a peak in the spectrum of the invariant mass of the Leptonpaars, just as there is to see and the Z boson of the Standard Model.

Swell

• Particle Physics
• Quantum field theory