Massive neutral gauge boson production as a probe of nuclear modifications of parton distributions at the LHC

We analyze the role of nuclear modifications of parton distributions, notably, the nuclear shadowing and antishadowing corrections, in the production of lepton pairs from decays of neutral Z and gamma* gauge bosons in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at the LHC. Using the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation formalism that we extended to the case of nuclear parton distributions, we observed a direct correlation between the predicted behavior of the transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of the produced vector bosons and the pattern of quark and gluon nuclear modifications. This makes the production of Z/gamma* in pA and AA collisions at the LHC a useful tool for constraining nuclear PDFs in the small-x shadowing and moderate-x antishadowing regions.