Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of W bosons produced in proton–proton collisions at √s=8TeV with the ATLAS detector

Collaboration, ATLAS and Barton, A.E. and Bertram, I.A. and Borissov, G. and Bouhova-Thacker, E.V. and Fox, H. and Henderson, R.C.W. and Jones, R.W.L. and Kartvelishvili, V. and Long, R.E. and Love, P.A. and Muenstermann, D. and Parker, A.J. and Smizanska, M. and Tee, A.S. and Walder, J. and Wharton, A.M. and Whitmore, B.W. (2019) Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of W bosons produced in proton–proton collisions at √s=8TeV with the ATLAS detector. European Physical Journal D, 79 (9): 760. ISSN 1434-6060

Abstract

This paper presents measurements of the W+→ μ+ν and W-→ μ-ν cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2fb-1. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8 and 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them. © 2019, CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS collaboration.