Study of W boson production in pPb collisions at sNN=5.02 TeV


Khachatryan V., Sirunyan A., Tumasyan A., Adam W., Bergauer T., Dragicevic M., ...More

Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics, vol.750, pp.565-586, 2015 (SCI-Expanded) identifier

Abstract

© 2015 CERN for the benefit of the CMS CollaborationThe first study of W boson production in pPb collisions is presented, for bosons decaying to a muon or electron, and a neutrino. The measurements are based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34.6 nb−1 at a nucleon–nucleon centre-of-mass energy of sNN=5.02 TeV, collected by the CMS experiment. The W boson differential cross sections, lepton charge asymmetry, and forward–backward asymmetries are measured for leptons of transverse momentum exceeding 25 GeV/c, and as a function of the lepton pseudorapidity in the |ηlab|<2.4 range. Deviations from the expectations based on currently available parton distribution functions are observed, showing the need for including W boson data in nuclear parton distribution global fits.