Neutral Current Forward-Backward Asymmetry: from ${\theta }_W$ to PDF Determinations

Abstract

Measurements of the forward-backward asymmetry in neutral-current Drell-Yan di-lepton production have primarily been used for determinations of the weak mixing angle ${\theta }_W$. We observe that, unlike the case of Run-I of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC Run-I), for the first time at the LHC Run-II the reconstructed forward-backward asymmetry has the capability of placing useful constraints on the determination of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). By examining the statistical and the PDF uncertainties on the reconstructed forward-backward asymmetry, we investigate its potential for disentangling the flavour content of quark and antiquark PDFs. Access to the valence/sea $u$-quark and to the sea up-type antiquark PDFs, in particular, may be gained by the appropriate use of selection cuts in the rapidity of the emerging lepton pair in regions both near the $Z$-boson peak and away from it, in a manner complementary, though more indirect, to the case of the charged-current asymmetry. We study the extension of these results for the planned high-luminosity (HL) LHC.

9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• Indirect Searches for $Z^{\prime }$-like Resonances at the LHC
• Constraining Parton Distribution Functions from Neutral Current Drell-Yan Measurements

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• Production of Z'-Boson Resonances with Large Width at the LHC
• PDF Profiling Using the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in Neutral Current Drell-Yan Production
• Lepton-Charge and Forward-Backward Asymmetries in Drell-Yan Processes for Precision Electroweak Measurements and New Physics Searches
• Longitudinal Z-Boson Polarization and the Higgs Boson Production Cross Section at the Large Hadron Collider
• ${\mathbf{Z}}^{\prime }$-boson dilepton searches and the high-$\mathbf{x}$ quark density
• Enhancing the Large Hadron Collider Sensitivity to Charged and Neutral Broad Resonances of New Gauge Sectors
• Factorization of the forward-backward charge asymmetry and measurements of the weak mixing angle and proton structure at hadron colliders
• Precision phenomenology with fiducial cross sections in the triple-differential Drell-Yan process
• Reduction of the electroweak correlation in the PDF updating by using the forward-backward asymmetry of Drell-Yan process
• Boost Asymmetry of the diboson productions in pp collisions
• Measurement of the proton structure parameters in the forward-backward charge asymmetry
• Exploring SMEFT Couplings Using the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in Neutral Current Drell-Yan Production at the LHC