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\times {10}^{-7}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} $ and $ {a}_C^W=9.2\times {10}^{-7}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-7} $ at 95% CL at an integrated luminosity of 300 fb$^{−1}$ by combining all final states, compared to values of about $ {a}_0^W=4\times {10}^{-6}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} $ and $ {a}_C^W=1\times {10}^{-5}{\mathrm{GeV}}^{-2} $ at 95% CL expected for the leptonic channel alone.