We report final results of a series of measurements of continuum dimuon production in proton-nucleus collisions at Fermilab. New results with 6 times more statistics are included. A full description of the apparatus and methods used in the analysis of this series of measurements is given. The sea quark distribution of the nucleon is determined within the context of Drell-Yan and quantum-chromodynamic description of dilepton production in hadron collisions.
We present a measurement of Z0 boson and Drell-Yan production cross sections in p¯p collisions at s=1.8TeV using a sample of 107pb−1 accumulated by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The Drell-Yan cross section is measured in the mass range of Mμμ>40GeV/c2. We compare the measurements with the predictions of quantum chromodynamics in both leading order and next-to-leading order, incorporating the recent parton distribution functions. The measurements are consistent with the standard model expectations.
We measure the Drell-Yan differential cross section d2σdMdy||y|<1 over the mass range 11<M<150 GeV/c2 using dielectron and dimuon data from p¯p collisions at a center-of-mass energy of s=1.8 TeV. Our results show the 1M3 dependence that is expected from the naive Drell-Yan model. In comparison to the predictions of recent QCD calculations we find our data favor those parton distribution functions with the largest quark contributions in the x interval 0.006 to 0.03.