Measurement of Differential Inclusive W Boson Production and Decay Cross Sections in the Muon Channel Using the ATLAS Detector

This thesis presents the measurement of $W&rarr;&mu;&nu;$ inclusive cross-sections based on proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 4.58 fb<super>-1</super>, collected with the ATLAS detector in 2011. The charge-dependent W&plusmn; differential cross-sections are provided in bins of muon pseudorapidity as well as double differentially in muon pseudorapidity and muon transverse momentum. The data are also presented as integrated cross-sections, in the fiducial region of the measurement and extrapolated to full phase space. Results are compared to predictions computed at NNLO QCD for different NNLO sets of parton distribution functions. The W&rarr;&mu;&nu; cross-sections are combined with complementary measurements in W&rarr;e&nu;, Z&rarr;&mu;&mu;, and Z&rarr;ee channels and used in a dedicated NNLO QCD analysis to obtain new constraints on the parton distributions in the proton.