CMS-PAS-SMP-22-008

CMS-PAS-SMP-22-008
Measurement of W $^{\pm}$ W $^{\pm}$ scattering in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13 TeV in final states with one tau lepton
CMS Collaboration
21 August 2023

Abstract: A measurement of the cross section for the scattering of same-sign W bosons is presented. This is the first study of a vector boson scattering process in the decay channel with a tau lepton ( $\tau$ ). The analysis is performed with proton-proton collision data collected by the CMS detector at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb $^{-1}$ . Events are selected with the requirement of one $\tau$ , one light lepton ( $e$ or $\mu$ ), missing transverse momentum, and two jets with large pseudorapidity separation and large dijet invariant mass. The measured electroweak same-sign WW scattering cross section, extracted with the amplitude for the QCD-associated diboson production fixed to the standard model value, is 1.44 $^{+0.63}_{-0.56}$ times the standard model prediction. The observed (expected) signal significance is 2.7 (1.9) standard deviations. A measurement of the combined electroweak and QCD-associated same-sign diboson production yields an observed (expected) significance of 2.9 (2.0) standard deviations.
Links: CDS record (PDF) ; CADI line (restricted) ; These preliminary results are superseded in this paper, Submitted to JHEP. The superseded preliminary plots can be found here.

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