Fiducial and differential cross-section measurements of electroweak $W\gamma jj$ production in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

The observation of the electroweak production of a $W$ boson and a photon in association with two jets, using $pp$ collision data at the Large Hadron Collider at a centre of mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV, is reported. The data were recorded by the ATLAS experiment from 2015 to 2018 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb${}^{-1}$. This process is sensitive to the quartic gauge boson couplings via the vector boson scattering mechanism and provides a stringent test of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model. Events are selected if they contain one electron or muon, missing transverse momentum, at least one photon, and two jets. Multivariate techniques are used to distinguish the electroweak $W\gamma jj$ process from irreducible background processes. The observed significance of the electroweak $W\gamma jj$ process is well above six standard deviations, compared to an expected significance of 6.3 standard deviations. Fiducial and differential cross sections are measured in a fiducial phase space close to the detector acceptance, which are in reasonable agreement with leading order Standard Model predictions from $MadGraph5+Pythia8$ and $Sherpa$. The results are used to constrain new physics effects in the context of an effective field theory.

48 pages in total, author list starting page 31, 8 figures, 6 tables, published in EPJC including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2018-31/

References in corpus (3)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• A parton shower algorithm based on Catani-Seymour dipole factorisation
• Isolating Vector Boson Scattering at the LHC: gauge cancellations and the Equivalent Vector Boson Approximation vs complete calculations

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Observation of $VVZ$ production at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• Observation of $W^{+}{W}^{-}\gamma$ production in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector and constraints on anomalous quartic gauge-boson couplings
• Constraints on Anomalous Quartic Gauge Couplings via Electroweak Production of $\gamma \gamma jj$ at Future Proton-Proton Colliders