PDF Flavor Determination and the nCTEQ15 PDFs: W ± / Z vector boson production in heavy ion collisions

Recent LHC W/Z vector boson production data in proton-lead collisionsare quite sensitive to the heavier flavors (especially the strangePDF), and this complements the information from neutrino-DIS data. Asthe proton flavor determination is dependent on nuclear corrections(from heavy target DIS, for example), LHC heavy ion measurements canalso help improve proton PDFs. We introduce a new implementation ofthe nCTEQ code (nCTEQ++) based on C++ which has a modular strucure andenables us to easily integrate programs such as HOPPET, APPLgrid, andMCFM. Using ApplGrids generated from MCFM, we use nCTEQ++ toperform a fit including the p-Pb LHC W/Z vector boson data.