Experimental results on the production of dimuons by 800-GeV protons incident on a copper target are presented. The results include measurements of both the continuum of dimuons and the dimuon decays of the three lowest-mass ϒ S states. A description of the apparatus, data acquisition, and analysis techniques is included. A comparison of the results with data taken at lower incident energies indicates a scaling behavior of the continuum dimuon yields.
The Fermilab E866/NuSea Collaboration has measured the Drell-Yan dimuon cross sections in 800 GeV/$c$ $pp$ and $pd$ collisions. This represents the first measurement of the Drell-Yan cross section in $pp$ collisions over a broad kinematic region and the most extensive study to date of the Drell-Yan cross section in $pd$ collisions. The results indicate that recent global parton distribution fits provide a good description of the light antiquark sea in the nucleon over the Bjorken-$x$ range $0.03 \lesssim x < 0.15$, but overestimate the valence quark distributions as $x \to 1$.
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