Massive neutral gauge boson production as a probe of nuclear modifications of parton distributions at the LHC

Abstract

We analyze the role of nuclear modifications of parton distributions, notably, the nuclear shadowing and antishadowing corrections, in production of lepton pairs from decays of neutral electroweak gauge bosons in proton-lead and lead-collisions at the LHC. Using the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation formalism that we extended to the case of nuclear parton distributions, we observed a direct correlation between the predicted behavior of the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of the produced vector bosons and the pattern of quark and gluon nuclear modifications. This makes Drell-Yan pair production in $pA$ and $AA$ collisions at the LHC a useful tool for constraining nuclear PDFs in the small-$x$ shadowing and moderate-$x$ antishadowing regions.

33 pages, 17 figures

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• New parton distributions for collider physics
• EPS09 - a New Generation of NLO and LO Nuclear Parton Distribution Functions
• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Gluon-gluon contributions to the production of continuum diphoton pairs at hadron colliders
• Transverse momentum broadening of vector boson production in high energy nuclear collisions
• Low-mass lepton pair production at large transverse momentum
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• Nonperturbative contributions to a resummed leptonic angular distribution in inclusive $Z/{\gamma }^{\ast }$ boson production

Cited by in corpus (11)

• QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories: challenges and perspectives
• Analysis of vector boson production within TMD factorization
• Study of Z boson production in pPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 5.02 TeV
• Observation of $Z$ production in proton-lead collisions at LHCb
• Estimating nonlinear effects in forward dijet production in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions at the LHC
• Probing the small-$x$ nuclear gluon distributions with isolated photons at forward rapidities in p+Pb collisions at the LHC
• Nuclear PDFs in the beginning of the LHC era
• Study of W and Z Boson Production in Proton-Lead Collisions at the LHC with KP Nuclear Parton Distributions
• Productions of $Z^0$ and $W^{+}/W^{-}$ in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC
• Nuclear parton density modifications from low-mass lepton pair production at the LHC
• Probing Shadowed Nuclear Sea with Massive Gauge Bosons in the Future Heavy-Ion Collisions