Sensitivity to exclusive WW production in photon scattering with ATLAS at the High Luminosity LHC

The prospects of measuring the process $\gamma\gamma\rightarrow WW$ with the ATLAS detector during the high luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) with a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb$^{−1}$ are studied. The opposite-flavour, opposite-sign fully leptonic final state is considered. This study compares baseline HL-LHC track reconstruction to low-$p_T$ tracking and finds that low-$p_T$ tracking is an essential research and development area for exclusive analyses at the HL-LHC. It also demonstrates that reducing background modelling uncertainties will be important in order to benefit from improvements in statistical precision. A differential analysis in dilepton mass shows that the sensitivity will be improved in the high-mass region with respect to the Run 2 analysis, opening up avenues for improved limits on anomalous gauge couplings and effective field theory fits in this region.