Constraining Gluonic Quartic Gauge Coupling Operators with $gg\to {\hat{I}}^3{\hat{I}}^3$

Abstract

Gluon-gluon to photon-photon scattering $gg\to {\hat{I}}^3{\hat{I}}^3$ offers to the LHC experiments a uniquely powerful probe of dimension-8 operators in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) that are quadratic in both the electromagnetic and gluonic field-strength tensors, such as would appear in the Born-Infeld extension of the Standard Model (SM). We use 13-TeV ATLAS data on the production of isolated photon pairs to set lower limits on the scales of dimension-8 operators $M\gtrsim 1$~TeV, and discuss the prospective sensitivities of possible future hadron colliders.

5 pages, 4 figures; to appear in PRL