Abstract
The proton-lead and lead-lead runs at the LHC are providing an enormous amount of data sensitive to the nuclear modifications of the initial state. The measurements explore a region of phase space not probed by previous experiments opening a possibility to test and, hopefully, also improve the current knowledge of nuclear parton densities. In this talk, we discuss to what extent the present quantitative results for the charge asymmetry in electroweak boson production show sensitivity to the nuclear parton distributions.
Highlights
A detailed description of the partonic structure of nucleons prior to a hard scattering is a key ingredient in precise description of high-energy collider data
As the nuclear corrections induced by EPS09 are almost identical for W+ anf W− production, they tend to cancel when forming the charge asymmetry
New data from the LHC has a potential to constrain nuclear PDFs (nPDFs) in ways that no other experiment has been able to do. In this short contribution we discussed how the measured charge asymmetries in W± production compare to the NLO pQCD predictions
Summary
A detailed description of the partonic structure of nucleons prior to a hard scattering is a key ingredient in precise description of high-energy collider data As such structure cannot yet be determined from the first principles of QCD, sets of parton density functions (PDFs) are traditionally extracted from experimental data by means of global fits in the framework of perturbative QCD. Most of the available nuclear data come from deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) which is a process dominated by the valence and the sea quark distributions leaving especially the gluon densities unconstrained. To improve this state of affairs, results from the LHC proton-lead and lead-lead runs should provide with a completely novel information. All the data used here are preliminary and only limited conclusions can be drawn
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