W and Z production in ATLAS and constraints on proton structure

The production cross sections of the inclusive processes W→lν and Z/γ⁎→ll(1=e,μ) are measured in proton-proton collisions at s=7TeV with the ATLAS detector. The cross sections are reported integrated over a fiducial kinematic range, extrapolated to the full range and also evaluated differentially as a function of the W decay lepton pseudorapidity and the Z boson rapidity, respectively. The integrated and the differential W± and Z/γ⁎ cross sections in the electron and muon channels are combined, and compared with perturbative QCD calculations, based on a number of different parton distribution sets available at NNLO. The impact of these data in constraining knowledge of the parton density functions in the proton is evaluated.