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

ABSTRACT

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.