Measurement of electroweak Z(vv[bar]) gamma jj production and limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings in pp collisions at CMS = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Abstract
The electroweak production of Z(-) in association with two jets is studied in a regime with a photon of high transverse momentum above 150 GeV using proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13TeV at the Large Hadron Collider. The analysis uses a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 139 fb-1 collected by the ATLAS detector during the 2015-2018 LHC data-taking period. This process is an important probe of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism in the Standard Model and is sensitive to quartic gauge boson couplings via vector-boson scattering. The fiducial Z(-) jj cross section for electroweak production is measured to be 0.77+0.34
-0.30 fb and is consistent with the
Standard Model prediction. Evidence of electroweak Z(-) jj production is found with an observed significance of 3.2 for the background-only hypothesis, compared with an expected significance of 3.7. The combination of this result with the previously published
ATLAS observation of electroweak Z(-) jj production yields an observed (expected) signal significance of 6.3 (6.6). Limits on anomalous quartic gauge boson couplings