Determination of the strange-quark density of the proton from ATLAS measurements of the W→ℓν and Z→ℓℓ cross sections

• Published in: Physical review letters 2012-07, Vol.109 (1), p.012001-012001
• Main Authors: Aad, G, Abbott, B, Abdallah, J, Abdelalim, A A, Abdesselam, A, Abdinov, O, Abi, B, Abolins, M, AbouZeid, O S, Abramowicz, H, Abreu, H, Acerbi, E, Acharya, B S, Adamczyk, L, Adams, D L, Addy, T N, Adelman, J, Aderholz, M, Adomeit, S, Adragna, P, Adye, T, Aefsky, S, Aguilar-Saavedra, J A, Aharrouche, M, Ahlen, S P, Ahles, F, Ahmad, A, Ahsan, M, Aielli, G, Akdogan, T, Åkesson, T P A, Akimoto, G, Akimov, A V, Akiyama, A, Alam, M S, Alam, M A, Albert, J, Albrand, S, Aleksa, M, Aleksandrov, I N, Alessandria, F, Alexa, C, Alexander, G, Alexandre, G, Alexopoulos, T, Alhroob, M, Aliev, M, Alimonti, G, Alison, J, Aliyev, M, Allbrooke, B M M, Allport, P P, Allwood-Spiers, S E, Almond, J, Aloisio, A, Alon, R, Alonso, A, Alvarez Gonzalez, B, Alviggi, M G, Amako, K, Amaral, P, Amelung, C, Ammosov, V V, Amorim, A, Amorós, G, Amram, N, Anastopoulos, C, Ancu, L S, Andari, N, Andeen, T, Anders, C F, Anders, G, Anderson, K J, Andreazza, A, Andrei, V, Andrieux, M-L, Anduaga, X S, Angerami, A, Anghinolfi, F, Anisenkov, A, Anjos, N, Annovi, A, Antonaki, A, Antonelli, M, Antonov, A, Antos, J, Anulli, F, Aoun, S, Aperio Bella, L, Apolle, R, Arabidze, G, Aracena, I, Arai, Y, Arce, A T H, Arfaoui, S, Arguin, J-F, Arik, E, Arik, M, Armbruster, A J, Arnaez, O
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: High Energy Physics - Experiment; Physics
• ISSN: 0031-9007; 1079-7114
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.012001

A QCD analysis is reported of ATLAS data on inclusive W(±) and Z boson production in pp collisions at the LHC, jointly with ep deep-inelastic scattering data from HERA. The ATLAS data exhibit sensitivity to the light quark sea composition and magnitude at Bjorken x∼0.01. Specifically, the data support the hypothesis of a symmetric composition of the light quark sea at low x. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea quark distributions is determined to be 1.00(-0.28)(+0.25) at absolute four-momentum transfer squared Q(2)=1.9  GeV(2) and x=0.023.