Novel Phenomenology of Parton Distributions from the Drell-Yan Process

Understand

The Drell-Yan massive lepton-pair production in hadronic collisions provides a unique tool complementary to the Deep-Inelastic Scattering for probing the partonic substructures in hadrons.

• We review key concepts, approximations, and progress for QCD factorization of the Drell-Yan process in terms of collinear or transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions.
• We present experimental results from recent fixed-target Drell-Yan as well as $W$ and $Z$ boson production at colliders, focussing on the topics of flavor structure of the nucleon sea as well as the extraction of novel Sivers and Boer-Mulders functions via single transverse spin asymmetries and azimuthal lepton angular distribution of the Drell-Yan process.
• Prospects for future Drell-Yan experiments are also presented.