Sea-quark Content of Nucleons from Proton-induced Drell-Yan Production

Abstract

We analyse the proton-induced Drell-Yan production in both the flavor asymmetry and isospin breaking explanations for the violation of the Gottfried sum rule. Consequences from three different forms of corrections to the flavor and isospin symmetric parton distributions are examined. It is found that the calculated results are sensitive to the choices of parameters and parton distributions, and to the ways the corrections are introduced. All three forms of corrections could be consistent with the recent Fermilab Experiment E772 data for the ratio of cross section $R={\sigma }_W/{\sigma }_{IS}$ and for the shape of the differential cross section $m^3{d}^2\sigma /d{x}_{F}dm$ for ${}^2$H.