Central exclusive production of W boson pairs in pp collisions at the LHC in hadronic and semi-leptonic final states
Abstract
We present a phenomenology study on central exclusive production of W+W- boson pairs in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at 14 TeV using the forward proton detectors, such as the ATLAS Forward Proton or the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer detectors. Final states where at least one of the W bosons decay hadronically in a large-radius jet are considered. The latter extends previous efforts that consider solely leptonic final states. A measurement of exclusive W+W- also allows us to further constrain anomalous quartic gauge boson interactions between photons and W bosons. Expected limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings a0,CW associated to dimension-six effective operators are derived for the hadronic, semi-leptonic, and leptonic final states. It is found that the couplings can be probed down to one-dimensional values of a0W = 3.7× 10-7 GeV-2 and aCW = 9.2 × 10-7 GeV-2 at 95\% CL at an integrated luminosity of 300 fb-1 by combining all final states, compared to values of about a0W = 4× 10-6 GeV-2 and aCW = 1× 10-5 GeV-2 at 95\% CL expected for the leptonic channel alone.