Measurements of electroweak $W^{\pm}Z$ boson pair production in association with two jets in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

Measurements of integrated and differential cross-sections for electroweak $W^{\pm}Z$ production in association with two jets ($W^{\pm}Zjj$) in proton$-$proton collisions are presented. The data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider from $2015$ to $2018$ at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV are used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $140$ fb$^{-1}$. The $W^{\pm}Zjj$ candidate events are reconstructed using leptonic decay modes of the gauge bosons. Events containing three identified leptons, either electrons or muons, and two jets are selected. Processes involving pure electroweak $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production at Born level are separated from $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production involving a strong coupling. The measured integrated fiducial cross-section of electroweak $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production per lepton flavour is $\sigma_{WZjj\mathrm{-EW} \rightarrow \ell^{'} \nu \ell \ell jj} = 0.368 \; \pm 0.037 \,(\mathrm{stat.}) \; \pm 0.059 \,(\mathrm{syst.}) \; \pm 0.003 \,(\mathrm{lumi.}) \; \mathrm{fb}$, where $\ell$ and $\ell^{'}$ are either an electron or a muon. Respective cross-sections of electroweak and strong $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production are measured separately for events with exactly two jets or with more than two jets, and in three bins of the invariant mass of the two jets. The inclusive $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production cross-section, without separating electroweak and strong production, is also measured to be $\sigma_{WZjj \rightarrow \ell^{'} \nu \ell \ell jj} = 1.462 \; \pm 0.063 \,(\mathrm{stat.}) \; \pm 0.118 \,(\mathrm{syst.}) \; \pm 0.012 \,(\mathrm{lumi.}) \; \mathrm{fb}$, per lepton flavour. The inclusive $W^{\pm}Zjj$ production cross-section is measured differentially for several kinematic observables. Finally, the measurements are used to constrain anomalous quartic gauge couplings by extracting 95% confidence level intervals on dimension-$8$ operators.