Impact of Heavy Flavor PDFs at the LHC

The discovery potential of the LHC depends sensitively on the input PDFs. Despite extensive efforts, the precision of the heavy quark distributions have significant uncertainties. We illustrate some of these issues for the case of the strange quark whose extraction is intertwined with the corresponding nuclear corrections. The use of LHC W/Z production data from both proton and heavy-ion beams could substantively improve the precision of both the PDFs and the nuclear corrections.