Observation of Z Production in Proton-Lead Collisions at LHCb

The first observation of Z boson production in proton-lead collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per proton-nucleon pair of √s_NN = 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/c. The Z production cross-section is measured to be σ_{Z → μ+ μ−}(fwd) = 13.5 {−4.0}{+5.4}(stat.) ± 1.2(syst.) nb in the direction of the proton beam and σ_{Z → μ+ μ−}(bwd) = 10.7 {−5.1}{+8.4}(stat.) ± 1.0(syst.) nb in the direction of the lead beam, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic.