Constraining Gluonic Quartic Gauge Coupling Operators with $gg \to γγ$

TL;DR

This work uses 13-TeV ATLAS data on the production of isolated photon pairs to set lower limits on the scales of dimension-8 operators M≳1  TeV and discusses the prospective sensitivities of possible future hadron colliders.

Abstract

Gluon-gluon to photon-photon scattering $gg \to γγ$ offers to the LHC experiments a uniquely powerful probe of dimension-8 operators in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) that are quadratic in both the electromagnetic and gluonic field-strength tensors, such as would appear in the Born-Infeld extension of the Standard Model (SM). We use 13-TeV ATLAS data on the production of isolated photon pairs to set lower limits on the scales of dimension-8 operators $M \gtrsim 1$~TeV, and discuss the prospective sensitivities of possible future hadron colliders.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Angular distributions in the centre-of-mass frame of $gg \rightarrow \gamma \gamma$ scattering (upper panel) and the corresponding total cross sections (lower panel), where a cut $|\cos \theta| < 0.9$ on the scattering angle in the center-of-mass frame has been used to regularize the SM cross section.
• Figure 2: Event spectra (upper panel) and sensitivities (lower panel) of ATLAS with $36.7\,\hbox{fb}^{-1}$.
• Figure 3: The effects of $E_T$ and $\cos \theta$ cuts for the ATLAS search.
• Figure 4: The event spectra (upper panel) and sensitivities (lower panel) at future hadron colliders.