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 measurement, 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 Z⁰ bosons produced at 14 TeV pp collisions (CERN LHC), constrain the x distributions of sea and valence quarks and antiquarks in the range from ≈3×10^-4 to ≈10^-1 at a Q² of about 10⁴ GeV². Furthermore, it is demonstrated that, once the quark and antiquark structure functions are constrained from the W^± and Z⁰ production dynamics, other qq̄ related scattering processes at the LHC such as qq̄→W⁺W^- can be predicted accurately. Thus, the lepton pseudorapidity distributions provide the key to a precise parton luminosity monitor at the LHC, with accuracies of ≈±1% compared to the so far considered goal of ±5%.