Intermediate mass dileptons from secondary Drell-Yan processes

Abstract Recent reports on enhancements of intermediate and high mass muon pairs produced in heavy ion collisions have attracted much attention. To gain a better understanding of the content of the dilepton continuum, we study Drell-Yan production from secondary hadron interactions in nucleus-nucleus collisions. We show that meson-baryon interactions can be an important source of m ∼ 2 GeV dileptons. We also discuss the effects of preresonance parton collisions.