Productions of $Z^0$ and $W^+/W^-$ in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC

Abstract

The productions of massive gauge bosons, $Z^0$ and $W^+/W^-$, in heavy-ion reactions at the LHC, provide an excellent tool to study the cold nuclear matter effects in high-energy nuclear collisions. In this paper we investigate $Z^0$ and $W^+/W^-$ productions in p+Pb and Pb+Pb at the LHC, at NLO and NNLO with DYNNLO incorporating the nuclear PDFs (nPDFs) parametrization sets EPS09 and DSSZ, within the framework of perturbative QCD. The numerical simulations of the transverse momentum spectra, rapidity dependence, and related nuclear modification factors for $Z^0$ and $W$ particles, as well as the charge asymmetry for W boson, are provided and tested against the latest experimental data. It is found that the theoretical results with EPS09 and DSSZ nPDFs can give good descriptions of the recent data on $Z^0$ and $W^{\pm}$ particles in p+Pb and Pb+Pb within the experimental error bars, though some differences between results with EPS09 and DSSZ can be observed, especially in the rapidity dependence of the $Z^0$ yield. Theoretical predictions for future measurements on $Z^0$ and $W$ in p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC are also provided.