Speaker
Mr
Kgotlaesele Johnson Senosi
(University of Cape Town and iThemba Laboratory of Accelerator Based Science)
Description
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is designed and optimized to study ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, in which a hot and dense strongly-interacting medium is created. W bosons are produced in hard scattering processes occurring at the early stage of the collision and, since they are not affected by the strong interaction, they can be used as a benchmark for medium-induced effects. In proton-nucleus collisions the production of W bosons can be used to study the modification of
Parton Distribution Functions in the nucleus and to test the validity of binary collision scaling. The latter is studied by measuring the yield of W bosons in different intervals of event activity. In ALICE, the production of W bosons is measured via the contribution of their muonic decays to the inclusive $p_{\rm T}$-differential muon yield reconstructed with the muon spectrometer at forward ($2.03 < \mathit{y}^{\mu}_{cms} < 3.53$) and backward rapidity ($-4.46< \mathit{y}^{\mu}_{cms} <-2.96$). The recent results from p--Pb collisions at $\sqrt {s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV will be presented and the measured cross sections will be compared to perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics calculations at next-to-leading order.
Primary author
Mr
Kgotlaesele Johnson Senosi
(University of Cape Town and iThemba Laboratory of Accelerator Based Science)
