Effect of flavor-dependent partonic transverse momentum on the determination of the W boson mass in hadronic collisions

Abstract

Within the framework of transverse-momentum-dependent factorization, we investigate for the first time the impact of a flavor-dependent intrinsic transverse momentum of quarks on the production of W± bosons in proton–proton collisions at s=7TeV. We estimate the shift in the extracted value of the W boson mass MW induced by different choices of flavor-dependent parameters for the intrinsic quark transverse momentum by means of a template fit to the transverse-mass and the lepton transverse-momentum distributions of the W-decay products. We obtain −6≤ΔMW+≤9MeV and −4≤ΔMW−≤3 MeV with a statistical uncertainty of ±2.5 MeV. Our findings call for more detailed investigations of flavor-dependent nonperturbative effects linked to the proton structure at hadron colliders.