Eur. Phys. J. A (2013) 49: 35
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2013-13035-6

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Massive neutral gauge boson production as a probe of nuclear modifications of parton distributions at the LHC

¹⁹⁸⁶⁶ Department of Physics, Hampton University, 23668, Hampton, VA, USA
²⁹⁸⁶⁶ Department of Physics, Southern Methodist University, 75275, Dallas, TX, USA
³⁹⁸⁶⁶ Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron DESY, Notkestrasse 85, D-22607, Hamburg, Germany
⁴⁹⁸⁶⁶ Department of Physics, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, 16802, PA, USA

^* e-mail: marco.guzzi@desy.de

Received: 10 January 2013
Accepted: 11 February 2013
Published online: 19 March 2013

Abstract

We analyze the role of nuclear modifications of parton distributions, notably, the nuclear shadowing and antishadowing corrections, in the production of lepton pairs from decays of neutral Z and γ∗ gauge bosons in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. Using the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation formalism that we extended to the case of nuclear parton distributions, we observed a direct correlation between the predicted behavior of the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of the produced vector bosons and the pattern of quark and gluon nuclear modifications. This makes the production of Z/γ∗ in pA and AA collisions at the LHC a useful tool for constraining nuclear PDFs in the small-x shadowing and moderate-x antishadowing regions.