Measurement of differential inclusive W boson production and decay cross sections in the muon channel using the atlas detector

This thesis presents the measurement of W→munu inclusive cross-sections based on proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 4.58 fb-1, collected with the ATLAS detector in 2011. The charge-dependent W+/- differential cross-sections are provided in bins of muon pseudorapidity as well as double differentially in muon pseudorapidity and muon transverse momentum. The data are also presented as integrated cross-sections, in the fiducial region of the measurement and extrapolated to full phase space. Results are compared to predictions computed at NNLO QCD for different NNLO sets of parton distribution functions. The W→munu cross-sections are combined with complementary measurements in W→ enu, Z → mumu, and Z → ee channels and used in a dedicated NNLO QCD analysis to obtain new constraints on the parton distributions in the proton.