W boson measurement in the muonic decay channel at forward rapidity with ALICE
The high collision energies available at the LHC allow for an abundant production of hard probes, such as quarkonia, high-pT jets and vector bosons (W, Z), which are produced in initial hard parton scattering processes. The latter decay before the formation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), which is a deconfined phase of QCD matter produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Their leptonic decay products do not interact strongly with the QGP. Thus electroweak bosons introduce a way for benchmarking in-medium modifications to coloured probes. The production of W-boson in pp collisions at √s=8 TeV and p-Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV are measured via the muonic decay channel at the LHC with the ALICE detector. In pp collisions the rapidity covered by the measurement is -4<$y_{cms}$<-2.5. In p-Pb collisions, on the other hand, the different energies of the proton and lead ion give rise to a rapidity shift. By exchanging the direction of the beams, it is possible to cover the rapidity ranges -4.46<$y_{cms}$<-2.96 and 2.03<$y_{cms}$<3.53. The production cross section and charge asymmetry of muons from W-boson decays with p$^\mu_T$>10 GeV/c are determined. The results are compared to theoretical calculations both with and without including the nPDFs. The W-boson production is also studied as a function of the collision centrality: the cross section of muons from W-boson decays is found to scale with the average number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions with uncertainties.