A microscopic calculation of secondary Drell-Yan production in heavy ion collisions

A study of secondary Drell-Yan production in nuclear collisions is presented for SPS energies. In addition to the lepton pairs produced in the initial collisions of the projectile and target nucleons, we consider the potentially high dilepton yield from hard valence antiquarks in produced mesons and antibaryons. We calculate the secondary Drell-Yan contributions taking the collision spectrum of hadrons from the microscopic model URQMD. The contributions from meson-baryon interactions, small in hadron-nucleus interactions, are found to be substantial in nucleus-nucleus collisions at low dilepton masses. Preresonance collisions of partons may further increase the yields.