Electroweak boson production in Pb+Pb

Measurements of electroweak boson production ($\gamma$, $\Wboson$/$\Zboson$) in heavy ion events provide a novel way to probe the properties of a quark-gluon plasma. Since these bosons do not interact with the strongly-coupled medium, measurements that combine their production yields with those from jets provide useful quantitative insights into the jet-quenching mechanism. In addition, the kinematic distributions of electroweak bosons are sensitive to parton distribution functions (PDF). Therefore, measuring such observables provide a means to investigate possible nuclear modifications of PDFs. This proceeding presents independent studies of $\Wboson$ boson, $\Zboson$ boson, and photon production in lead-lead collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} =2.76 \TeV$ using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 0.14$~\inb$ collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011. The measurements were conducted in a well-defined kinematic range as a function of the average number of participating nucleons $\mNpart$ and (pseudo)rapidity. These results are compared to corresponding jet measurements as well as to predictions based on modified leading-order and next-to-leading-order calculations.