Probing cold nuclear matter effects with weak gauge boson production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

Within the framework of pQCD, we systematically study the $W^{\pm }/Z^0$ boson production as a probe of cold nuclear matter effects and nuclear parton distributions in p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC and future colliders. A detailed analysis at partonic level is performed. Moreover, with a semi-microscopic KP model of NPDFs, in which several nuclear effects (e.g. Fermi motion and nuclear binding, the off-shell correction, the nuclear coherent correction, and the nuclear meson correction) are included, we study the vector boson rapidity distribution in p+Pb collisions at the LHC, and a very good agreement with the latest data is found, including the $W$-boson charge asymmetry.

Comments: 4 pages, 7 figures. Proceedings for the 8th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2016), 22-27 September 2016, Wuhan, China