Heavy ions are collided at high energies at the Large Hadron Collider, allowing to study the properties of nuclear matter and to produce the hot and dense state of deconfined matter known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In order to probe the nuclear matter effects present in heavy-ion collisions, this thesis study the production of two important hard probes: W bosons and charmonia (J/ψ and ψ(2S) mesons).The cold nuclear matter effects, associated to the nuclear modification of the parton distribution functions (PDFs), can be characterised by studying the formation of W bosons in heavy-ion collisions. The production of W bosons represents an important tool to asses the PDF modifications, which impact the initial hard scattering, since thes...