Probing Shadowed Nuclear Sea with Massive Gauge Bosons in the Future Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

The production of the massive bosons $Z^0$ and $W^{\pm }$ could provide an excellent tool to study cold nuclear matter effects and the modifications of nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) relative to parton distribution functions (PDFs) of a free proton in high energy nuclear reactions at the LHC as well as in heavy-ion collisions (HIC) with much higher center-of mass energies available in the future colliders. In this paper we calculate the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions of the vector boson and their nuclear modification factors in p+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=63$TeV and in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=39$TeV in the framework of perturbative QCD by utilizing three parametrization sets of nPDFs: EPS09, DSSZ and nCTEQ. It is found that in heavy-ion collisions at such high colliding energies, both the rapidity distribution and the transverse momentum spectrum of vector bosons are considerably suppressed in wide kinematic regions with respect to p+p reactions due to large nuclear shadowing effect. We demonstrate that in the massive vector boson productions processes with sea quarks in the initial-state may give more contributions than those with valence quarks in the initial-state, therefore in future heavy-ion collisions the isospin effect is less pronounced and the charge asymmetry of W boson will be reduced significantly as compared to that at the LHC. Large difference between results with nCTEQ and results with EPS09 and DSSZ is observed in nuclear modifications of both rapidity and $p_T$ distributions of $Z^0$ and $W$ in the future HIC.

13 pages, 21 figures, version accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. J. C

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Predictions for Cold Nuclear Matter Effects in $p+$Pb Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{{}_{NN}}}=8.16$ TeV
• Predictions for $p+$Pb Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5$ TeV: Comparison with Data
• Study of W and Z Boson Production in Proton-Lead Collisions at the LHC with KP Nuclear Parton Distributions
• Scaling properties of inclusive W${}^{\pm }$ production at hadron colliders
• Imaging nuclear modifications on parton distributions with triple-differential dijet cross sections in proton-nucleus collisions
• Multiprocess imaging of nuclear modifications on parton distributions in proton-nucleus collisions
• Probing cold nuclear matter effects with weak gauge boson production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions