Low mass dimuon production at the CERN proton-antiproton collider

We present a study of low mass dimuon events [m(μμ) < 6 GeV/c2] from the UA1 experiment at the CERN pp collider. Contributions from semileptonic decays of heavy flavour particles, Drell-Yan type processes, J/ψ decays and leptonic decays of light mesons are extracted, and cross sections for high pT beauty and Drell-Yan production are derived. A limit for the branching fraction for the exotic decay B0→μ+μ− is also obtained. The cross section for section for low mass, high pT Drell-Yan prod uction is compared to the measured direct photon cross section using QED and QCD derived relationship. This relationship is used to infer a measurement of the single photon cross section at lower values of transverse momentum, where photons cannot be unambigously identified.