26–31 Jul 2015
Quy Nhon, Vietnam
Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh timezone

Measurements of W boson production in p-Pb collisions at the LHC with ALICE

28 Jul 2015, 16:00
30m
Quy Nhon, Vietnam

Quy Nhon, Vietnam

International Center of Interdisciplinary Science Education (ICISE)

Speaker

Kgotlaesele Senosi (University of Cape Town (ZA))

Description

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is designed and optimized to study ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, in which a hot and dense, strongly-interacting medium is created. W bosons are produced in hard scattering processes and interact weakly with the medium formed in heavy-ion collisions. Thus, these electroweak bosons are suitable references for processes which are heavily affected by the medium. In proton-nucleus collisions the production of W bosons is suitable to study the modification of parton distribution functions in the nucleus and to test the validity of binary collision scaling. The latter is studied by measuring the yield of W bosons in different intervals of event activity. The production of W bosons is studied in p--Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt {s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV with the ALICE muon spectrometer at forward ($2.03 < \mathit{y}^{\mu}_{\textrm{cms}} < 3.53$) and backward rapidity ($-4.46< \mathit{y}^{\mu}_{\textrm{cms}} <-2.96$). The W-boson signal is extracted from the inclusive single muon differential $p_{\rm T}$ spectrum. Recent results are discussed, and the measured cross sections are compared to perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics calculations at next-to-leading order.

Primary author

Kgotlaesele Senosi (University of Cape Town (ZA))

Presentation materials