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Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 4483–4487 (2001)

Energy Loss of Fast Quarks in Nuclei

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M. B. Johnson1, B. Z. Kopeliovich2, I. K. Potashnikova2, P. L. McGaughey1, J. M. Moss1, J. C. Peng1, G. T. Garvey1, M. J. Leitch1, M. R. Adams3, D. M. Alde1, H. W. Baer1,6,*, M. L. Barlett4, C. N. Brown5, W. E. Cooper5, T. A. Carey1, G. Danner1,6, G. W. Hoffmann4, Y. B. Hsiung5, D. M. Kaplan7,†, A. Klein1,‡, C. Lee1, J. W. Lillberg1, R. L. McCarthy8, C. S. Mishra1,§, and M. J. Wang6,** (FNAL E772 Collaboration)
1Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
2Max-Plank-Institut für Kernphysik, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany
3University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois 60510
4University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712
5Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois 60510
6Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
7Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115
8State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794

Received 13 March 2000; revised 16 October 2000; published in the issue dated 14 May 2001

We report an analysis of the nuclear dependence of the yield of Drell-Yan dimuons from the 800GeV/c proton bombardment of 2H, C, Ca, Fe, and W targets. Employing a new formulation of the Drell-Yan process in the rest frame of the nucleus, this analysis examines the effect of initial-state energy loss and shadowing on the nuclear-dependence ratios versus the incident proton's momentum fraction and dimuon effective mass. The resulting energy loss per unit path length is -dE/dz = 2.32±0.52±0.5GeV/fm. This is the first observation of a nonzero energy loss of partons traveling in a nuclear environment.

© 2001 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.4483
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.4483
PACS:
24.85.+p, 13.85.Qk, 25.40.Ve

*Deceased.

†Present address: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 60616.

‡Present address: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia 23529.

§Present address: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois 60510.

**Present address: Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan 11529.

 
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