Acknowledge support from FMSR (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and FAPESP (Brazil); MES (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); COLCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES (Croatia); RPF (Cyprus); Academy of Sciences and NICPB (Estonia); Academy of Finland, ME, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3 (France); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRT (Greece); OTKA and NKTH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); NRF and WCU (Korea); LAS (Lithuania); CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); PAEC (Pakistan); SCSR (Poland); FCT (Portugal); JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan); MST and MAE (Russia); MSTD (Serbia); MICINN and CPAN (Spain); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); NSC (Taipei); TUBITAK and TAEK (Turkey); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA).

A search for Z bosons in the μ+μ- decay channel has been performed in PbPb collisions at √sNN=2.76 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC, in a 7.2 μb-1 data sample. The number of opposite-sign muon pairs observed in the 60–120 GeV/c2 invariant mass range is 39, corresponding to a yield per unit of rapidity (y) and per minimum bias event of [33.8±5.5(stat)±4.4(syst)]×10-8, in the |y|<2.0 range. Rapidity, transverse momentum, and centrality dependencies are also measured. The results agree with next-to-leading order QCD calculations, scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions.

14 páginas, 1 tabla, 2 figuras.-- PACS numbers: 25.75.Cj, 12.38.Bx, 14.70.Hp.-- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.-- CMS Collaboration: et al.

Peer reviewed