Electroweak vector bosons are excellent probes for testing our understanding of the hot, dense medium created in high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei. W and Z bosons reconstructed via their leptonic decay channels are unaffected by the presence of the medium, hence the production yields of the bosons carry information about the initial conditions of the collision. Kinematic distributions of electroweak bosons are sensitive to the nuclear modification of parton distribution functions. Measuring the boson production yields tests our understanding of the collision geometry, which involves scaling of the hard scattering cross section with the total number of binary nucleon collisions. 

The ATLAS detector has a large acceptance in the muon and electron channels, with excellent performance even in the highest particle density reached in HI collisions.  ATLAS has recorded 520 µb−1 of lead-lead data at the center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV per nucleon. The data can be compared directly to the 27 nb-1 proton-proton reference data collected and to the 29nb−1 of proton-lead data collected in Run 1 In this talk, results of the measurement of W and Z boson production are presented in lead-lead and proton-lead systems.