Measurement of the Z boson production cross-section in proton-lead collisions at root(NN)-N-s=8.16 TeV

Lesya Shchutska, Olivier Schneider, Aurelio Bay, Guido Haefeli, Frédéric Blanc, Tatsuya Nakada, François Fleuret, John Martin Kolinski, Mingkui Wang, Chao Wang, Yi Zhang, Liang Sun, Ian William Marison, Maxim Karpov, Simone Meloni, Xiaoqing Zhou, Chunmin Zhang, Marco Guarise, Basil Andrew Stansfield Davis, Eliazar Rodriguez Garcia, Mercedes Hannelore Rittmann-Frank, Yang Zou, Arnout Lodewijk M Beckers, I-Chun Lin, Fabiano Colpo, Michael Thompson McCann, Remy Jean Henry Albrecht, Huizhen Liu, Achille Mauri, Xiaoqiang Wang, Valérie Jeanne Thérèse Renaudin-Schouler, Chia-Chun Chen, Craig Matthew Smith
2023

Abstract

This article presents the first measurement of the differential Z-boson production cross-section in the forward region using proton-lead collisions with the LHCb detector. The dataset was collected at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of root(NN)-N-s = 8.16TeV in 2016, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 30.8 nb(-1). The forward-backward ratio and the nuclear modification factors are measured together with the differential crosssection as functions of the Z boson rapidity in the centre-of-mass frame, the transverse momentum of the Z boson and a geometric variable phi*. The results are in good agreement with the predictions from nuclear parton distribution functions, providing strong constraining power at small Bjorken-x.

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