Speaker
Description
In this talk we present the measurement of the muon pair continuum in p+p and p+Au collisions at a center of mass energy of 200 GeV. Our novel analysis technique enables the isolation of correlated pairs from semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons and from the Drell-Yan process. The measured azimuthal correlations of muon pairs from heavy flavor decays are used to constrain the relative contributions of different production mechanisms of ccbar and bbar pairs in p+p collisions. For bottom production, data from p+Au places limits on possible cold nuclear modifications. Measuring the in Drell-Yan cross-section in p+p and p+A collisions constrains nuclear parton distribution functions and furthers our understanding of initial state effects.
