Lepton pair production at ISR energies and QCD

Abstract

Motivated by some recent results from the ISR we have considered all available data on the production of Drell-Yan pairs by high energy proton beams. We show that the lepton pair cross sections and qT distributions are correctly described by QCD using the known distributions of partons in the proton and acceptable values of the QCD scale Λ. No other free parameter is required. Within the accuracy of the data no appreciable intrinsic transverse momentum is needed.