Speaker
Francesco Bossu
(iThemba Lab. for Accel. Based Sci. (ZA))
Description
At the LHC, electroweak boson production measurements in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions are possible thanks to the availability of higher centre of mass energies as well as higher luminosities with respect to other ion accelerator facilities.
From a theoretical point of view, electroweak boson production can be considered to be well understood. $\rm Z^{0}$ and $\rm W^{\pm}$ bosons are produced in initial hard-scattering processes of partons and are not expected to interact with a strongly interacting medium. Therefore, measurements of electroweak bosons in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions represent a standard candle to check the validity of binary scaling and can provide important constraints to the nuclear parton distribution functions. In addition, such measurements could represent an ideal test-bench for luminosity measurements and detector performance studies.
ALICE is the experiment at the LHC designed to investigate the properties of strongly-interacting matter formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. At forward rapidities, ALICE is equipped with a muon spectrometer that allows measurements of dimuon decays of quarkonia, muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays and also $\rm W^{\pm}$ bosons in the muon decay channel. Recent results on the $\rm W^{\pm}$ boson measurement at forward and backward rapidities, with respect to the direction of the proton beam, in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 5.02$ TeV will be presented.
| On behalf of collaboration: | ALICE |
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Primary author
Francesco Bossu
(iThemba Lab. for Accel. Based Sci. (ZA))
