Diffractive Drell-Yan process: hard or soft?

Abstract: Single diffractive Drell-Yan reaction in hadron-hadron collisions is considered as an important source of information on the properties of soft QCD interactions. In particular, it provides an access to the dynamics of the QCD factorisation breaking due to the interplay between hard and soft interactions which leads to a nontrivial energy and scale dependence of the Drell-Yan observables. We study the process at forward rapidities in high energy proton-(anti)proton collisions in the color dipole approach. Predictions for the total and differential cross sections of the diffractive lepton pair production are given at different energies.