Measurement of electroweak WZ production and search for new physics in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV

A measurement of WZ electroweak vector boson scattering is presented. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton--proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13~\mathrm{TeV}$ collected with the CMS detector and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $35.9~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$. The measurement is performed in the leptonic decay modes $\mathrm{WZ} \to \ell\nu\ell^\prime \ell^\prime$, where $\ell, \ell^\prime = \mathrm{e}$, $\mu$. Electroweak WZ production in association with two jets is measured with an observed (expected) significance of 1.9 (2.7) standard deviations. The total WZ plus two jet production cross section is measured in fiducial regions with enhanced contributions from electroweak production and found to be consistent with the standard model prediction. Constraints on charged Higgs production and on anomalous quartic gauge couplings in terms of dimension-eight effective field theory operators are also presented.