We analyze the role of nuclear modifications of parton distributions,
notably, the nuclear shadowing and antishadowing corrections, in production of
lepton pairs from decays of neutral electroweak gauge bosons in proton-lead and
lead-collisions at the LHC. Using the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation
formalism that we extended to the case of nuclear parton distributions, we
observed a direct correlation between the predicted behavior of the transverse
momentum and rapidity distributions of the produced vector bosons and the
pattern of quark and gluon nuclear modifications. This makes Drell-Yan pair
production in pA and AA collisions at the LHC a useful tool for
constraining nuclear PDFs in the small-x shadowing and moderate-x
antishadowing regions.Comment: 33 pages, 17 figure