Origin of nonscaling in dimuon continuum production in hadron collisions

Abstract

We study the scaling of the mass spectrum of muon continuum pairs produced in hadron collisions. While Drell-Yan pairs scale as $\frac{m^{3}d\sigma }{\mathrm{dm}}=f\left(\frac{m^2}{s}\right)$, dimuons produced by annihilations of quarks and antiquarks created during the space-time evolution of the collision exhibit clear nonscaling behavior. Such a two-component picture is shown to be consistent with the available data.