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

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 I bosons in proton-proton collisions at root s = 7 TeV. We estimate the shift in the extracted value of the W-+/- boson mass M-w 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 transversemomentum distributions of the W-decay products. We obtain -6 <= Delta M-w+ <= 9 MeV and -4 <= Delta M-w- <= 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. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.