Novel phenomenology of parton distributions from the Drell-Yan process

The Drell-Yan massive lepton-pair production in hadronic collisions provides a unique tool complementary to the Deep-Inelastic Scattering for probing the partonic substructures in hadrons. We review key concepts, approximations, and progress for QCD factorization of the Drell-Yan process in terms of collinear or transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions. We present experimental results from recent fixed-target Drell-Yan as well as W and Z boson production at colliders, focusing on the topics of flavor structure of the nucleon sea as well as the extraction of novel Sivers and Boer-Mulders functions via single transverse spin asymmetries and azimuthal lepton angular distribution of the Drell-Yan process. Prospects for future Drell-Yan experiments are also presented. (c) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.