Disentangling shadowing from coherent energy loss using the Drell-Yan process

Abstract

We suggest the measurement of Drell-Yan (DY) lepton pairs in p-Pb collisions at the LHC (sqrt(s)=5.02 TeV) in order to disentangle the relative contributions of shadowing and coherent energy loss in quarkonium production off nuclei. The nuclear modification of low mass DY production is computed at NLO using various sets of nuclear parton densities. It is then observed that shadowing effects strongly cancel out in the J/psi over DY suppression ratio R_{pA}^{J/psi}(y) / R_{pA}^{DY}(y), unlike the effect of coherent energy loss. Such a measurement could be performed at forward rapidity by the ALICE and LHCb collaborations at the LHC.