Abstract

A QCD analysis is reported of ATLAS data on inclusive W± and Z boson production in pp collisions at the LHC, jointly with ep deep-inelastic scattering data from HERA. The ATLAS data exhibit sensitivity to the light quark sea composition and magnitude at Bjorken x∼0.01. Specifically, the data support the hypothesis of a symmetric composition of the light quark sea at low x. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea quark distributions is determined to be 1.00−0.28+0.25 at absolute four-momentum transfer squared Q2=1.9 GeV2 and x=0.023.Received 19 March 2012DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.012001This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.© 2012 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration

Highlights

  • Little is known about the strange-quark distribution in the proton

  • Knowledge of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton comes mainly from deep-inelastic lepton proton scattering experiments covering a broad range of Q2, the absolute four-momentum transfer squared, and of Bjorken x

  • In the present Letter it is shown that the differential measurements of the inclusive WÆ and Z boson cross sections at the LHC, recently performed by the ATLAS collaboration using 35 pbÀ1 of pp collision data recorded in 2010 [14], provide new constraints on the strange-quark distribution at high scale, Q2 $ MW2 ;Z, which imply constraints at low Q2 through perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) evolution

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Summary

Introduction

Little is known about the strange-quark distribution in the proton. Flavor SUð3Þ symmetry suggests that the three light sea quark distributions are equal. In the present Letter it is shown that the differential measurements of the inclusive WÆ and Z boson cross sections at the LHC, recently performed by the ATLAS collaboration using 35 pbÀ1 of pp collision data recorded in 2010 [14], provide new constraints on the strange-quark distribution at high scale, Q2 $ MW2 ;Z, which imply constraints at low Q2 through pQCD evolution.

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