Effective role of unpolarized nonvalence partons in Drell-Yan single spin asymmetries

We perform numerical simulations of the Sivers effect from single spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes on transversely polarized protons. We consider colliding antiprotons and pions at different kinematic conditions of interest for the future planned experiments. We conventionally name "framework I" the results obtained when properly accounting for the various flavor dependent polarized valence contributions in the numerator of the asymmetry, and for the unpolarized nonvalence contribution in its denominator. We name "framework II" the results obtained when taking a suitable flavor average of the valence contributions and neglecting the nonvalence ones. We compare the two methods, also with respect to the input parametrization of the Sivers function which is extracted from data with approximations sometimes intermediate between frameworks I and II. Deviations between the two approaches are found to be small except for dilepton masses below 3 GeV. The Sivers effect is used as a test case; the arguments can be generalized to other interesting azimuthal asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes, such as the Boer-Mulders effect.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures in eps forma

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

The Drell-Yan process is a standard tool for probing the partonic structure of hadrons. Since the process proceeds through a quark-antiquark annihilation, Drell-Yan scattering possesses a unique ability to selectively probe sea distributions. This review examines the application of Drell-Yan scattering to elucidating the flavor asymmetry of the nucleon's sea and nuclear modifications to the sea quark distributions in unpolarized scattering. Polarized beams and targets add an exciting new dimension to Drell-Yan scattering. In particular, the two initial-state hadrons give Drell-Yan sensitivity to chirally-odd transversity distributions.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, to appear in J. Phys. G, resubmission corrects typographical error