Measurement of the light antiquark flavor asymmetry in the nucleon sea.

The NuSea collaboration Hawker, E.A. ; Awes, T.C. ; Beddo, M.E. ; et al.
Phys.Rev.Lett. 80 (1998) 3715-3718, 1998.
Inspire Record 468098 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.42153

A precise measurement of the ratio of Drell-Yan yields from an 800 GeV/c proton beam incident on hydrogen and deuterium targets is reported. Over 140,000 Drell-Yan muon pairs with dimuon mass M_{mu+ mu-} >= 4.5 GeV/c^2 were recorded. From these data, the ratio of anti-down (dbar) to anti-up (ubar) quark distributions in the proton sea is determined over a wide range in Bjorken-x. A strong x dependence is observed in the ratio dbar/ubar, showing substantial enhancement of dbar with respect to ubar for x<0.2. This result is in fair agreement with recent parton distribution parameterizations of the sea. For x>0.2, the observed dbar/ubar ratio is much nearer unity than given by the parameterizations.

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