Central exclusive production of W boson pairs in pp collisions at the LHC in hadronic and semi-leptonic final states

We present a phenomenology study on central exclusive production of W + W − boson pairs in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at 14 TeV using the forward proton detectors, such as the ATLAS Forward Proton or the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer detectors. Final states where at least one of the W bosons decay hadronically in a large-radius jet are considered. The latter extends previous efforts that consider solely leptonic final states. A measurement of exclusive W + W − also allows us to further constrain anomalous quartic gauge boson interactions between photons and W bosons. Expected limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings a_0,C^W associated to dimension-six effective operators are derived for the hadronic, semi-leptonic, and leptonic final states. It is found that the couplings can be probed down to one-dimensional values of a_0^W=3.7×10^-7GeV^-2 and a_C^W=9.2×10^-7GeV^-7 at 95