Effect of flavor-dependent partonic transverse momentum on the determination of the $W$ boson mass in hadronic collisions

Abstract

Within the framework of transverse-momentum-dependent factorization, we investigate for the first time the impact of a flavor-dependent intrinsic transverse momentum of quarks on the production of $W^{\pm}$ bosons in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV. We estimate the shift in the extracted value of the $W$ boson mass $M_W$ induced by different choices of flavor-dependent parameters for the intrinsic quark transverse momentum by means of a template fit to the transverse-mass and the lepton transverse-momentum distributions of the $W$-decay products. We obtain $-6\leq \Delta M_{W^+} \leq 9$ MeV and $-4\leq \Delta M_{W^-} \leq 3$ MeV with a statistical uncertainty of $\pm 2.5$ MeV. Our findings call for more detailed investigations of flavor-dependent nonperturbative effects linked to the proton structure at hadron colliders.