Quark Energy Loss and Shadowing in Nuclear Drell–Yan Process**Theproject partially supported by National NaturalScience Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 90103020, 10075057, and 10175074, CAS Knowledge Innovation Project under Grant No. KJCX2-SW-N02, the StateKey Basic Research Development Program under Grant No. G20000774,and the Natural ScienceFoundation of Hebei Province of China under Grant No. 103143

Abstract

The energy loss effect in nuclear matter is another nucleareffect apart from the nuclear effects on the parton distributionas in deep inelastic scattering process. The quark energy loss canbe measured best by the nuclear dependence of the high energynuclear Drell–Yan process. By means of three kinds of quarkenergy loss parameterizations given in literature and thenuclear parton distribution extracted only with lepton-nucleusdeep inelastic scattering experimental data, measured Drell–Yanproduction cross sections are analyzed for 800 GeV proton incidenton a variety of nuclear targets from FNAL E866. It is shown thatour results with considering the energy loss effect are muchdifferent from those of the FNAL E866, who analyzes theexperimental data with the nuclear parton distribution functionsobtained by using the deep inelastic lA collisions and pA nuclearDrell–Yan data. Considering the existence of energy loss effect inDrell–Yan lepton pairs production, we suggest that the extractionof nuclear parton distribution functions should notinclude Drell–Yan experimental data.