TOWARDS A PRECISE PARTON LUMINOSITY DETERMINATION AT THE CERN LHC

A new approach to determine the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) luminosity is investigated. Instead of employing the proton-proton luminosity me asurement, we suggest to measure directly the parton-parton luminosity . It is shown that the electron and muon pseudorapidity distributions, originating from the decay of W+, W-, and Z(0) bosons produced at 14 TeV pp collisions (CERN LHC), constrain the x distributions of sea and valence quarks and antiquarks in the range from approximate to 3 X 10 (-4) to approximate to 10(-1) at a Q(2) of about 10(4) GeV2. Furthermo re, it is demonstrated that, once the quark and antiquark structure fu nctions are constrained from the W- and Z(0) production dynamics, othe r q (q) over bar related scattering processes at the LHC such as q (q) over bar-->W+W- can be predicted accurately. Thus, the lepton pseudor apidity distributions provide the key to a precise parton luminosity m onitor at the LHC, with accuracies of approximate to+/-1% compared to the so far considered goal of +/-5%.