Hadron collider probes of the quartic couplings of gluons to the photon and Z boson

Abstract

We explore the experimental sensitivities of measuring the gg → Zγ process at the LHC to the dimension-8 quartic couplings of gluon pairs to the Z boson and photon, in addition to comparing them with the analogous sensitivities in the gg → γγ process. These processes can both receive contributions from 4 different CP-conserving dimension-8 operators with distinct Lorentz structures that contain a pair of gluon field strengths, {hat{G}}_{mu v}^a , and a pair of electroweak SU(2) gauge field strengths, {W}_{mu v}^i , as well as 4 similar operators containing a pair of {hat{G}}_{mu v}^a and a pair of U(1) gauge field strengths, Bμν. We calculate the scattering angular distributions for gg → Zγ and the Z → overline{f}f decay angular distributions for these 4 Lorentz structures, as well as the Standard Model background. We analyze the sensitivity of ATLAS measurements of the Z(→ ℓ+ℓ−, overline{nu}nu , overline{q}q )γ final states with integrated luminosities up to 139 fb−1 at sqrt{s} = 13 TeV, showing that they exclude values ≲ 2 TeV for the dimension-8 operator scales, and compare the Zγ sensitivity with that of an ATLAS measurement of the γγ final state. We present combined Zγ and γγ constraints on the scales of dimension-8 SMEFT operators and γγ constraints on the nonlinearity scale of the Born-Infeld extension of the Standard Model. We also estimate the sensitivities to dimension-8 operators of experiments at possible future proton-proton colliders with centre-of-mass energies of 25, 50 and 100 TeV, and discuss possible measurements of the Z spin and angular correlations.