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 $W^{\pm }$ bosons in proton–proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7\text{TeV}$. 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 transverse-momentum distributions of the W-decay products. We obtain $-6\le \Delta M_{W^{+}}\le 9\text{MeV}$ and $-4\le \Delta M_{W^{-}}\le 3$ 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.