Production of massive lepton pairs in hadronic collisions

The production of lepton pairs of large invariant mass in high-energy hadronic collisions is studied. A general method for treating the typical phase-space integrations that arise is derived and employed in subsequent model calculations. The general properties of annihilation models are discussed in an invariant context, and the various distributions are studied in a pion-annihilation model. The SU(3) properties of the quark-annihilation model are investigated and the cross section is related to deep-inelastic neutrino structure functions. A model is studied in which the lepton pair is emitted by a bremsstrahlung process, and a cancellation among the several graphs is seen to reduce the incident energy dependence by one power of $s$.