Measurement of the light antiquark flavor asymmetry in the nucleon sea uri icon

abstract

  • A precise measurement of the ratio of Drell-Yan yields from an800GeV/c proton beam incident on hydrogen and deuterium targets is reported. Over 140 000 Drell-Yan muon pairs with dimuon mass M+4.5 GeV/c2 were recorded. From these data, the ratio of antidown (d) to antiup (u) quark distributions in the proton sea is determined over a wide range in Bjorken x. A strong x dependence is observed in the ratio d/u, showing substantial enhancement of d with respect to u for x<0.2. This result is in fair agreement with recent parton distribution parametrizations of the sea. For x>0.2, the observed d/u ratio is much nearer unity than given by the parametrizations. 1998 The American Physical Society.

published proceedings

  • PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

altmetric score

  • 3

author list (cited authors)

  • Hawker, E. A., Awes, T. C., Beddo, M. E., Brown, C. N., Bush, J. D., Carey, T. A., ... Young, G. R.

citation count

  • 265

complete list of authors

  • Hawker, EA||Awes, TC||Beddo, ME||Brown, CN||Bush, JD||Carey, TA||Chang, TH||Cooper, WE||Gagliardi, CA||Garvey, GT||Geesaman, DF||He, XC||Isenhower, LD||Kaufman, SB||Kaplan, DM||Kirk, PN||Koetke, DD||Kyle, G||Lee, DM||Lee, WM||Leitch, MJ||Makins, N||McGaughey, PL||Moss, JM||Mueller, BA||Nord, PM||Park, BK||Papavassiliou, V||Peng, JC||Petitt, G||Reimer, PE||Sadler, ME||Selden, J||Stankus, PW||Sondheim, WE||Thompson, TN||Towell, RS||Tribble, RE||Vasiliev, MA||Wang, YC||Wang, ZF||Webb, JC||Willis, JL||Wise, DK||Young, GR

publication date

  • April 1998