Massive Lepton-Pair Production in Hadron-Hadron Collisions at High Energies

Abstract

On the basis of a parton model studied earlier we consider the production process of large-mass lepton pairs from hadron-hadron inelastic collisions in the limiting region, $s\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, $\frac{{Q}^{2}}{s}$ finite, ${Q}^{2}$ and $s$ being the squared invariant masses of the lepton pair and the two initial hadrons, respectively. General scaling properties and connections with deep inelastic electron scattering are discussed. In particular, a rapidly decreasing cross section as $\frac{{Q}^{2}}{s}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1$ is predicted as a consequence of the observed rapid falloff of the inelastic scattering structure function $\ensuremath{\nu}{W}_{2}$ near threshold.