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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weak gauge boson production in high-energy heavy-ion collisions can reveal cold nuclear matter effects and refine nuclear parton distribution functions, using perturbative QCD and a semi-microscopic model.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed perturbative QCD analysis combined with a semi-microscopic nuclear PDF model to study vector boson production and nuclear effects in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Good agreement with LHC data on vector boson rapidity distributions

Accurate description of W-boson charge asymmetry in p+Pb collisions

Enhanced understanding of nuclear modifications of parton distributions

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.