Continuum Dimuon Production inp¯-W Collisions at 125 GeV/c

The cross section for the reaction $\overline{p}N\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}X$ with muon pairs in the mass range $4<M<\mathrm{}9\mathrm{}$ GeV/${\mathit{c}}^2$ and $x_F>0\mathrm{}$ was measured to be $\sigma =0.104\mathrm{}\pm 0.005\pm 0.008$ nb/nucleon. The distributions $\frac{d\sigma }{d{x}_F}$ and $\frac{M^{3}d\sigma }{\mathrm{dM}}$ were compared to the QCD-improved Drell-Yan model and to calculations including first-order QCD corrections, with use of deep-inelastic structure functions. Excellent agreement with the data was obtained if the calculations were multiplied by factors of 2.45 and 1.41, respectively.