Nucleon partonic spin structure to be explored by the unpolarized Drell-Yan program of COMPASS experiment at CERN

Abstract: The observation of the violation of Lam-Tung relation in the $\pi N$ Drell-Yan process triggered many theoretical speculations. The TMD Boer-Mulders functions characterizing the correlation of transverse momentum and transverse spin for partons in unpolarized hadrons could nicely account for the violation. The COMPASS experiment at CERN will measure the angular distributions of dimuons from the unpolarized Drell-Yan process over a wide kinematic region and study the beam particle dependence. Significant statistics is expected from a successful run in 2015 which will bring further understanding of the origin of the violation of Lam-Tung relation and of the partonic transverse spin structure of the nucleon.