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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear modifications of parton distributions affect the production of neutral gauge bosons in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC, proposing Drell-Yan processes as a tool to constrain nuclear PDFs.

Contribution

It extends the Collins-Soper-Sterman formalism to include nuclear parton distributions, linking vector boson production patterns to nuclear modifications of quarks and gluons.

Findings

Transverse momentum and rapidity distributions are sensitive to nuclear modifications.

Drell-Yan production can constrain nuclear PDFs in shadowing and antishadowing regions.

The formalism provides a direct way to study nuclear effects at small and moderate x.

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.