The unprecedented center-of-mass energy available at the LHC offers unique
opportunities for studying the properties of the strongly-interacting QCD
matter created in PbPb collisions at extreme temperatures and very low parton
momentum fractions. Electroweak boson production is an important benchmark
process at hadron colliders. Precise measurements of Z production in heavy-ion
collisions can help to constrain nuclear PDFs as well as serve as a standard
candle of the initial state in PbPb collisions at the LHC energies. The
inclusive and differential measurements of the Z boson yield in the muon decay
channel will be presented, establishing that no modification is observed with
respect to next-to-leading order pQCD calculations, scaled by the number of
incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions. The status of the Z measurement in the
electron decay channel, as well as the first observation of W \rightarrow \mu
{\nu} in heavy ion collisions will be given. The heavy-ion results will be
presented in the context of those obtained in pp collisions with the CMS
detector.Comment: Quark Matter 2011 conference proceeding
