Hadronic lepton pair production and quantum chromodynamics

Abstract

In hadronic lepton-pair production, light-cone expansion is not possible. However, QCD asymptotic perturbative expansion can be applied to such process. We study the QCD with its property of asymptotic freedom and investigate the large transverse momentum lepton-pair production. The result shows that QCD asymptotic perturbative expansion fits well with the data by considering intrinsic transverse moments of the partons inside the incoming hadrons. However, phenomenology indicates that the Drell-Yan mechanism is still dominant at present energies, provided that the parton distribution functions contain the effects of narrow gluon radiation.