Measurement of exclusive $\gamma \gamma \to W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production and search for exclusive Higgs boson production in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV using the ATLAS detector

Abstract

Searches for exclusively produced $W$ boson pairs in the process $pp(\gamma \gamma )\to p{W}^{+}{W}^{-}p$ and exclusively produced Higgs boson in the process $pp(gg)\to pHp$ have been performed using $e^{\pm }{\mu }^{\mp }$ final states. These measurements use 20.2 fb${}^{-1}$ of $pp$ collisions collected by the ATLAS experiment at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV at the LHC. Exclusive production of $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ consistent with the Standard Model prediction is found with 3.0$\sigma$ significance. The exclusive $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production cross-section is determined to be $\sigma (\gamma \gamma \to W^{+}{W}^{-}\to e^{\pm }{\mu }^{\mp }X)=6.9\pm 2.2(stat.)\pm 1.4(sys.)$ fb, in agreement with the Standard Model prediction. Limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings are set at 95\% confidence-level as $-1.7\times 10^{-6}<a_0^W/{\Lambda }^2<1.7\times 10^{-6}$ GeV${}^{-2}$and $-6.4\times 10^{-6}<a_C^W/{\Lambda }^2<6.3\times 10^{-6}$ GeV${}^{-2}$. A 95\% confidence-level upper limit on the total production cross-section for exclusive Higgs boson is set to 1.2 pb.

31 pages + author list (48 pages total), 15 figures, 12 tables, published in Phys. Rev. D, all figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2015-10/

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