Measurement of W-boson production in p–Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV with ALICE at the LHC

In hadronic collisions, electroweak bosons are produced in initial hard scattering processes and they are not affected by the strong interaction. In proton-proton collisions, they have been suggested as standard candles for luminosity monitoring and their measurement can improve the evaluation of detector performances. In nucleus-nucleus and proton-nucleus collisions, W-bosons allow one to check at first order the validity of binary collision scaling, while small deviations allow to study the nuclear modifications of parton distribution functions. The W-boson production in p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV is measured via the contribution of W-boson decays to the inclusive pT-differential muon yield reconstructed with the ALICE muon spectrometer at forward (2.03 < y(μ)(cms) < 3.53) and backward (-4.46 < y(μ)(cms) < -2.96) rapidity. This paper reports the production cross section of muons from W-boson decays for p(μ)(T) > 10 GeV/c and the yields normalised to the average number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions as a function of the event activity.