Observation of photon-induced $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using the ATLAS detector

Abstract

This letter reports the observation of photon-induced production of $W$-boson pairs, $\gamma \gamma \to WW$. The analysis uses 139 fb${}^{-1}$ of LHC proton-proton collision data taken at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment during the years 2015-2018. The measurement is performed selecting one electron and one muon, corresponding to the decay of the diboson system as $WW\to e^{\pm }\nu {\mu }^{\mp }\nu$ final state. The background-only hypothesis is rejected with a significance of well above 5 standard deviations consistent with the expectation from Monte Carlo simulation. A cross section for the $\gamma \gamma \to WW$ process of 3.13$\pm$0.31(stat.)$\pm$0.28(syst.) fb is measured in a fiducial volume close to the acceptance of the detector, by requiring an electron and a muon of opposite signs with large dilepton transverse momentum and exactly zero additional charged particles. This is found to be in agreement with the Standard Model prediction.

arXiv comment41 pages in total, author list starting page 25, 6 figures, 2 tables, published in Phys. Lett. B.. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-21

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