Systematic approach to inclusive lepton pair production in hadronic collisions

Abstract

Strong-interaction dynamics as probed by lepton pair production in hadronic collisions is naturally separated from kinematics by using suitably defined structure functions. In the first part of this paper, general properties of invariant structure functions and a variety of "helicity" structure functions for this process are studied, and their use discussed. An exact parallelism to the case of deep-inelastic lepton-hadron scattering is set up. In the second part, a series of parton-model relations between the structure functions, reflecting the basic Drell-Yan on-shell quark-antiquark annihilation picture (but independent of details of parton distributions), is derived. These relations serve the dual purposes of (i) supplementing the model-independent structure-function formalism and rendering it useful for analyzing data of limited scope initially, and (ii) providing unambiguous tests of various aspects of the underlying quark-parton model when more detailed data become available.