Constraints on anomalous quartic gauge couplings via $Z\gamma jj$ production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper studies how anomalous quartic gauge couplings affect Z gamma jj production at the LHC within SMEFT, considering unitarity bounds and polarization effects to improve sensitivity estimates for dimension-8 operators.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent approach applying unitarity bounds to analyze aQGC signals and explores polarization effects to distinguish operator contributions.

Findings

Unitarity bounds significantly suppress certain operator signals.

Polarization effects help identify specific aQGC operators.

Sensitivity estimates for dimension-8 operators at 14 TeV are provided.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the contributions of anomalous quartic gauge couplings (aQGCs) to $Z\gamma jj$ production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the context of Standard Model effective theory (SMEFT). When energy scale is large, the validity of SMEFT becomes an important issue. To ensure the validity, the unitarity bound is applied in a model independent approach, which is found to have significant suppressive effects on the signals of $O_{M_i}$ operators. The kinematic and polarization features of the aQGC signals are also studied. The polarization effect is useful to highlight the signals of $O_{T_i}$ operators. The sensitivity estimates on dimension-8 operators with unitarity bounds at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV are obtained.