Exploring the Partonic Structure of Hadrons through the Drell-Yan Process

摘要

The Drell-Yan process is a standard tool for probing the partonic structureof hadrons. Since the process proceeds through a quark-antiquark annihilation,Drell-Yan scattering possesses a unique ability to selectively probe seadistributions. This review examines the application of Drell-Yan scattering toelucidating the flavor asymmetry of the nucleon's sea and nuclear modificationsto the sea quark distributions in unpolarized scattering. Polarized beams andtargets add an exciting new dimension to Drell-Yan scattering. In particular,the two initial-state hadrons give Drell-Yan sensitivity to chirally-oddtransversity distributions.