Measurement of the production of a W boson in association with a charm quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Abstract
The production of a W boson in association with a single charm quark is studied using 4.6 fb-1 of pp collision data at sqrt(s)=7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In events in which a W boson decays to an electron or muon, the charm quark is tagged either by its semileptonic decay to a muon or by the presence of a charmed meson. The integrated and differential cross sections as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the W-boson decay are measured. Results are compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD calculations obtained from various parton distribution function parameterisations. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea-quark distributions is determined to be 0.96 +0.26 -0.30 at Q2=1.9 GeV2, which supports the hypothesis of an SU(3)-symmetric composition of the light-quark sea. Additionally, the cross-section ratio sigma(W+ + barc)/sigma(W- + c) is compared to the predictions obtained using parton distribution function parameterisations with different assumptions about the s-bars quark asymmetry.