Drell–Yan process

The Drell–Yan process occurs in high energy hadron–hadron scattering. It takes place when a quark of one hadron and an antiquark of another hadron annihilate, creating a virtual photon or Z boson which then decays into a pair of oppositely-charged leptons. Importantly, the energy of the colliding quark-antiquark pair can be almost entirely transformed into the mass of new particles. This process was first suggested by Sidney Drell and Tung-Mow Yan in 1970 to describe the production of lepton–antilepton pairs in high-energy hadron collisions. Experimentally, this process was first observed by J. H. Christenson et al. in proton–uranium collisions at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.