Abstract

Electroweak bosons do not interact strongly with the dense and hot medium formed in nuclear collisions, and thus should be sensitive to the nuclear modification of parton distribution functions (nPDFs). The in-medium modification of heavy charmonium states plays an important role in studying the hot and dense medium. The ATLAS detector, optimized to search for new physics in proton-proton interactions, is well equipped to measure Z and W bosons as well as quarkonium in the high occupancy environment produced in heavy ion collisions. Results from the ATLAS experiment on W and Z boson yields as a function of centrality, transverse momentum and rapidity, in lead-lead and proton-lead collisions are presented. Quarkonium results from proton-lead interactions are also shown.

Highlights

  • Electroweak (EW) bosons are a valuable tool to study the hot and dense medium created in heavy-ion collisions

  • This finding confirmed the applicability of pQCD calculations in heavy-ion collisions, as well as the Glauber model description of the nucleonic geometry of the collisions

  • The experimental precision of these measurements, did not reach the level needed in order to determine whether there are nuclear modifications of the parton distribution function (PDF)

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Summary

Introduction

Electroweak (EW) bosons are a valuable tool to study the hot and dense medium created in heavy-ion collisions. Since they are insensitive to the strong force and do not interact with the QCD medium, the rate of their production in different centrality classes, allows a test of binary collision scaling within heavy ion collisions. The p+Pb collision system is more sensitive to the effects of nuclear modification of the PDF, and the larger dataset obtained by the ATLAS experiment [3] from the 2013 LHC run enabled greater experimental precision in the results making it a fertile system to study. The study of quarkonium in p+Pb collisions is informative both as a baseline for A+A collisions and as an avenue to study nuclear modification

Electroweak Bosons in Proton-Lead Collisions
Quarkonium in Proton-Lead Collisions
Centrality in Proton-Lead Collisions
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