Speaker
Description
Electroweak bosons produced in Pb+Pb collisions are an excellent tool to constrain initial state effects which affect hard scattering process rates in nucleon-nucleon interactions. The production yields of massive electroweak bosons, observed via their leptonic decay channels, offer a high-precision test of the binary collision scaling expected in Pb+Pb and a way to quantify nuclear modifications of the parton distribution functions. The large sample of Pb+Pb data at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV obtained by the ATLAS experiment in 2015, and the corresponding high-statistics $pp$ data at the same collision energy used as a baseline, allow for a detailed experimental study of these phenomena and comparisons to predictions from a variety of theoretical calculations. This talk presents the latest ATLAS results on electroweak boson production, including updated results on Z production and high-precision W boson results in lead-lead collisions.
