Observation of electroweak W+W- pair production in association with two jets in proton-proton collisions at √s=13 TeV

An observation is reported of the electroweak production of a W+W- pair in association with two jets, with both W bosons decaying leptonically. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions at root s =13 TeV, collected by the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. Events are selected by requiring exactly two opposite-sign leptons (electrons or muons) and two jets with large pseudorapidity separation and high dijet invariant mass. Events are categorized based on the flavor of the final-state leptons. A signal is observed with a significance of 5.6 standard deviations (5.2 expected) with respect to the background-only hypothesis. The measured fiducial cross section is 10.2 +/- 2.0 fb and this value is consistent with the standard model prediction of 9.1 +/- 0.6 fb. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).