A brief review of measurements of electroweak bosons at the LHCb experiment in LHC Run 1

TL;DR

This review summarizes LHCb's measurements of electroweak bosons during LHC Run 1, highlighting their role in testing the Standard Model, constraining parton distributions, and measuring the weak mixing angle with high precision.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of LHCb's electroweak boson measurements from Run 1 and discusses their significance and future potential in particle physics research.

Findings

Most precise measurement of sin^2θ_lept. in LHCb to date

LHCb's phase space is highly sensitive to the weak mixing angle

Electroweak measurements at LHCb complement other experiments

Abstract

The LHCb experiment is one of four major experiments at the LHC. Despite being designed for the study of beauty and charm particles, it has made important contributions in other areas, such as the production and decay of $W$ and $Z$ bosons. Such measurements can be used to study and constrain parton distribution functions, as well as to test perturbative quantum chromodynamics in hard scattering processes. The angular structure of $Z$ boson decays to leptons can also be studied and used to measure the weak mixing angle. The phase space probed by LHCb is particularly sensitive to this quantity, and the LHCb measurement using the dimuon final state is currently the most precise determination of $\sin^2\theta^\text{lept.}_\text{eff.}$ at the LHC. LHCb measurements made using data collected during the first period of LHC operations (LHC Run 1) are discussed in this review. The article also considers the potential impact of related future measurements.