High-mass dimuon resonances in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV in CMS

The measurement of the charmonium (J/ψ, ψ′) and bottomonium (Υ, Υ′, Υ′′) resonances and Z boson in nucleus-nucleus collisions provides crucial information on high density QCD matter. The observation of anomalous suppression of J/ψ at the CERN-SPS and RHIC is well established but the clarification of some important questions requires equivalent studies of the Υ family, only possible at LHC energies. The Z boson will be produced for the first time in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC and, since its dominant production channel is through qq̄ fusion, it is an excellent probe of the nuclear modification of quark distribution functions. This paper reports the capabilities of the CMS detector to study quarkonium and Z production in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV, through the dimuon decay channel. Presented at Quark Matter 2008,4-10 February 2008,Jaipur,India