Vector boson production in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC and its impact on nCTEQ15 PDFs

Abstract: We provide a comprehensive comparison of W/Z vector boson production data in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC with predictions obtained using the nCTEQ15 PDFs. We identify the measurements which have the largest potential impact on the PDFs, and estimate the effect of including these data using a Monte Carlo reweighting method. We find this data set can provide information about both the nuclear corrections and the heavy flavor (strange) PDF components. As the proton flavor determination is dependent on nuclear corrections (from heavy target DIS, for example), this information can also help improve the proton PDFs.