Observation of Z production in proton-lead collisions at LHCb

Abstract

The first observation of Z boson production in proton-lead collisions at a centreof-mass energy per proton-nucleon pair of √ sNN = 5 TeV is presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.6 nb−1 collected with the LHCb detector. The Z candidates are reconstructed from pairs of oppositely charged muons with pseudorapidities between 2.0 and 4.5 and transverse momenta above 20 GeV/c. The invariant dimuon mass is restricted to the range 60 − 120 GeV/c2 . The Z production cross-section is measured to be σZ→µ+µ− (fwd) = 13.5 +5.4 −4.0 (stat.) ± 1.2(syst.) nb in the direction of the proton beam and σZ→µ+µ− (bwd) = 10.7 +8.4 −5.1 (stat.) ± 1.0(syst.) nb in the direction of the lead beam, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic.