Dilepton production from polarized hadron hadron collisions

Abstract

In this paper we present a comprehensive formalism for dilepton production from the collision of two polarized spin-12 hadrons by identifying the general angular distribution of the cross section in combination with a complete set of structure functions. The various structure functions are computed in the parton model approximation where we mainly consider the case when the transverse momentum of the dilepton pair is much smaller than its invariant mass. In this kinematical region dilepton production can be described in terms of transverse momentum dependent parton distributions. © 2009 The American Physical Society.