Drell

Drell is a surname and a term used in physics. The most prominent individual with this name is Sidney Drell (1926–2016), an American theoretical physicist noted for work in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear policy, and radiation theory. The name is also associated with the Drell–Yan process, described by Sidney Drell and Tung-Ming Yan in 1970.

In high-energy physics, the Drell–Yan process is the mechanism by which a quark from one hadron and an antiquark from another annihilate to form a virtual photon or Z boson, which then decays into a lepton pair. This process provides a way to study the internal structure of hadrons through parton distribution functions and to test aspects of electroweak interactions and quantum chromodynamics. Beyond this primary association, Drell mainly appears as a surname and may be encountered in various contexts unrelated to physics. The term is thus most commonly linked to the physicist Sidney Drell and the Drell–Yan process in scientific literature.