Speaker
Description
Understanding the partonic energy loss in cold nuclear matter is crucial for a better interpretation of observations in future EIC experiments as well as the hot nuclear matter in high-energy collisions such as in LHC. Thus, the topic has received a lot of attention from the community over the past few decades. A clean probe to study the energy loss of partons in cold nuclear mater is nuclear dependence of the Drell-Yan (DY) cross section. A series of p-A DY experiments were conducted at Fermilab to separate the effects of shadowing from the energy loss; E772 ($\sqrt{s}\approx 39$ GeV, $0.04 <x_T<0.30$), E866 ($\sqrt{s}\approx 39$ GeV, $0.01 <x_T<0.12$) and E906 ($\sqrt{s}\approx 15$ GeV, $0.1 <x_T<0.45$). The E906 (SeaQuest) experiment studied the DY production of dimuons by scattering a 120 GeV proton beam off fixed liquid H$_2$, D$_2$ and solid Fe, C, W targets. The data set collected provides an opportunity to study the nuclear dependence of the DY cross section and to separate shadowing effects from energy loss, by utilizing a lower beam energy in contrast to the predecessor experiments. The E906 Collaboration has extracted the DY cross-section ratios (CSRs) ($\frac{2}{A} \frac{\sigma_{pA}}{\sigma_{pd}}$) for Fe/D, C/D, and W/D and in this talk we will present the status of this analysis. The potential for the interesting physics that we planned to reveal will be discussed.
This work was supported in part by US DOE grant DE-FG02-94ER40847.
