Vector Boson Fusion and Vector Boson Scattering Measurements at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Vector boson fusion and vector boson scattering at high energies are direct probes of boson interactions in the Standard Model and beyond. The non-Abelian nature of the electroweak Standard Model admits triple and quartic couplings of the electroweak vector bosons and the photon. Measurements of the boson production cross sections give insight into the couplings themselves. Recent measurements have been made using proton--proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These results and others provide stringent tests of the techniques for electroweak cross section calculations and kinematic modeling. They are designed to capture all aspects of the couplings, including differential cross sections, polarized weak boson scattering, and anomalous electroweak gauge boson couplings. For maximum sensitivity, the results are unfolded in electroweak fiducial regions where vector boson fusion and vector boson scattering are enhanced relative to other production mechanisms. They are also interpreted in the context of effective field theories, where additional operators and coefficients in the Lagrangian parameterize the anomalous couplings.