Double Drell-Yan annihilations in hadron collisions: Novel tests of the constituent picture

Abstract

The production in hadron collisions of a pair of virtual photons, each having a large invariant mass, proceeds via two mechanisms: (a) two independent Drell-Yan-type annihilations of quark pairs in a single interaction and (b) the pair annihilation process $q\overline{q}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\gamma}}^{*}{\ensuremath{\gamma}}^{*}$. We argue that both mechanisms allow intriguing tests of constituent structure and its associated scaling laws and we show that, despite their ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{4}$ production rate, events of this type are accessible with existing $\ensuremath{\pi}$ and proton beams.