Soft quark annihilation contribution to the low mass dimuon production in high-p T jet events

Abstract

The soft quark annihilation contribution to the low-mass, unlike-sign dimuon production in high-p T jet events, which has recently been observed by the UA1 collaboration at the CERN protonantiproton collider, is estimated within a model that successfully describes the anomalous dilepton production in soft hadronic collisions. A method is proposed for disentangling the various production mechanisms, based on comparing the mean multiplicity of hadrons accompanying a dimuon with a quantity calculated from the lowest multiplicity moments in events without dimuons.