Measurement and interpretation of same-sign W boson pair production in association with two jets in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents the measurement of fiducial and differential cross sections for both the inclusive and electroweak production of a same-sign W-boson pair in association with two jets (W^±W^±jj) using 139 fb⁻¹ of proton-proton collision data recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The analysis is performed by selecting two same-charge leptons, electron or muon, and at least two jets with large invariant mass and a large rapidity difference. The measured fiducial cross sections for electroweak and inclusive W^±W^±jj production are 2.92 ± 0.22 (stat.) ± 0.19 (syst.) fb and 3.38 ± 0.22 (stat.) ± 0.19 (syst.) fb, respectively, in agreement with Standard Model predictions. The measurements are used to constrain anomalous quartic gauge couplings by extracting 95% confidence level intervals on dimension-8 operators. A search for doubly charged Higgs bosons H^±± that are produced in vector-boson fusion processes and decay into a same-sign W boson pair is performed. The largest deviation from the Standard Model occurs for an H^±± mass near 450 GeV, with a global significance of 2.5 standard deviations.