Measurement of the cross section for electroweak production of a Z boson, a photon and two jets in proton-proton collisions at s$$ \sqrt{\mathrm{s}} $$ = 13 TeV and constraints on anomalous quartic couplings

• Main Authors: Sirunyan, A. M (Author), Tumasyan, A. (Author), Adam, W. (Author), Ambrogi, F. (Author), Bergauer, T. (Author), Brandstetter, J. (Author), Dragicevic, M. (Author), Erö, J. (Author), Escalante Del Valle, A. (Author), Flechl, M. (Author), Frühwirth, R. (Author), Jeitler, M. (Author), Krammer, N. (Author), Krätschmer, I. (Author), Liko, D. (Author), Madlener, T. (Author), Mikulec, I. (Author), Rad, N. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2021-09-20T17:29:49Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Abstract A measurement is presented of the cross section for electroweak production of a Z boson and a photon in association with two jets (Zγjj) in proton-proton collisions. The Z boson candidates are selected through their decay into a pair of electrons or muons. The process of interest, electroweak Zγjj production, is isolated by selecting events with a large dijet mass and a large pseudorapidity gap between the two jets. The measurement is based on data collected at the CMS experiment at s$$ \sqrt{s} $$ = 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The observed significance of the signal is 3.9 standard deviations, where a significance of 5.2 standard deviations is expected in the standard model. These results are combined with published results by CMS at s$$ \sqrt{s} $$ = 8 TeV, which leads to observed and expected respective significances of 4.7 and 5.5 standard deviations. From the 13 TeV data, a value is obtained for the signal strength of electroweak Zγjj production and bounds are given on quartic vector boson interactions in the framework of dimension-eight effective field theory operators.