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 {a}_{0,C}^W 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 {a}_0^W=3.7times {10}^{-7}{mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} and {a}_C^W=9.2times {10}^{-7}{mathrm{GeV}}^{-7} at 95% CL at an integrated luminosity of 300 fb−1 by combining all final states, compared to values of about {a}_0^W=4times {10}^{-6}{mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} and {a}_C^W=1times {10}^{-5}{mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} at 95% CL expected for the leptonic channel alone.