Incoming Quark Energy Loss In Cold Nuclear Matter

A quantitative understanding of the quark propagation and hadron formation processes in a nuclear medium would greatly benefit the study of quark-gluon plasma and its evolution in time. In the Drell-Yan process of high energy proton-nucleus collisions, The quark from the projectile can lose some of its energy due to multiple scattering and soft gluon radiation. The dilepton from quark-antiquark annihilation does not interact strongly with the surrounding medium. So, by studying the nuclear Drell-Yan process is useful for us to understanding deeply the energy loss of the incoming quark while it traversing the nuclear matter.In this paper, the nuclear effects of nuclear Drell-Yan process is investigated through using the experimental data from E866/NuSea collaborations at Fermilab. A theoretical calculations of leading order for the nuclear Drell-Yan differential cross section ratio as a function on the quark momentum fraction x are presented and compared with the experimental data. It is found that from the fit of E866(xi) data, we obtain the gluon "transport coefficient" to be q=2.8516±0.36202 andq=0.41532± 0.27984 that corresponds to HKM01 and EPS09 nuclear parton distributions by theχ2 analysis method, respectively. It is also demonstrated that the incident quark energy loss in nuclear Drell-Yan process strongly depends on the nuclear parton distribution functions adopted.