Measurement of W- and Z-boson production in p—Pb collisions at √s(NN) = 5.02 TeV with ALICE at the LHC

In hadronic collisions, electroweak bosons (W and Z) 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, electroweak bosons provide a check at first order of the validity of binary collision scaling, while small deviations allow studying the nuclear modifications of parton distribution functions. In ALICE, the production of W and Z bosons is measured via the contribution of W-boson decays to the inclusive p T-differential muon yield and the invariant mass of unlike-sign muon pairs from Z-boson decays, respectively, at large rapidities. This paper reports on the production cross sections of muons from W muonic decay and of Z boson in p- Pb collisions at √s (NN) = 5.02 TeV, which are compared to the theoretical calculations, and on the W-boson yields normalized to the average number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions as a function of the event activity.