Evidence for the production of three massive vector bosons with the ATLAS detector

Collaboration, ATLAS and Barton, A.E. and Bertram, I.A. and Borissov, G. and Bouhova-Thacker, E.V. and Fox, H. and Henderson, R.C.W. and Jones, R.W.L. and Kartvelishvili, V. and Long, R.E. and Love, P.A. and Muenstermann, D. and Parker, A.J. and Smizanska, M. and Tee, A.S. and Walder, J. and Wharton, A.M. and Whitmore, B.W. (2019) Evidence for the production of three massive vector bosons with the ATLAS detector. Physics Letters B, 798: 134913. ISSN 0370-2693

Abstract

A search for the production of three massive vector bosons in proton–proton collisions is performed using data at s=13 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in the years 2015–2017, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 79.8 fb−1. Events with two same-sign leptons ℓ (electrons or muons) and at least two reconstructed jets are selected to search for WWW→ℓνℓνqq. Events with three leptons without any same-flavour opposite-sign lepton pairs are used to search for WWW→ℓνℓνℓν, while events with three leptons and at least one same-flavour opposite-sign lepton pair and one or more reconstructed jets are used to search for WWZ→ℓνqqℓℓ. Finally, events with four leptons are analysed to search for WWZ→ℓνℓνℓℓ and WZZ→qqℓℓℓℓ. Evidence for the joint production of three massive vector bosons is observed with a significance of 4.1 standard deviations, where the expectation is 3.1 standard deviations. © 2019 The Author(s)