Measurements of exclusive production with the ATLAS detector

In the absence of forward proton tagging, exclusive processes can be distinguished in the central part of the ATLAS detector exploiting the large rapidity gap in the central region and the absence of charged particles reconstructed in the inner tracking detector. This strategy has been adopted to study the exclusive production of dilepton pairs in the data taken at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV. A measurement of exclusive production of dileptons (ee and mumu) proton-proton collisions is presented. The results show significant deviations from the pure QED prediction, which can be explained by photon coherence and proton rescattering effects. If available, a first measurement of the exclusive di-muon production in proton–proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and a measurement of the production of exclusive pions at 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector will be also presented. In addition, an analysis performed at 8 TeV concentrates on the electron-muon final state to study the exclusive production of WW boson pairs. This analysis is re-optimised to search for the exclusive production of the Higgs boson in the WW* decay channel and the corresponding results will be discussed.