Measurements of differential cross-sections of WbWb production in the dilepton channel in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV using the ATLAS detector

Ali, Hanadi and Alsolami, Zainab and Barton, A.E. and Borissov, G. and Bouhova-Thacker, E.V. and Fernandez Barbadillo, B. and Ferrando, James and Fox, H. and Hagan, Alina and Jones, R.W.L. and Kartvelishvili, V. and Love, P.A. and Marshall, Emma J. and McElhinney, Luke and Meng, L. and Sampson, Elliot and Smizanska, M. and Wharton, A.M. (2026) Measurements of differential cross-sections of WbWb production in the dilepton channel in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV using the ATLAS detector. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2026 (2): 153. ISSN 1029-8479

Abstract

At the Large Hadron Collider, the WbWb final state is expected to be dominated by tt¯ production with a contribution from single-top processes. Differential cross-sections for WbWb production in the dilepton decay channel are measured at the particle level as a function of various kinematic variables. The analysis is based on data from proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s=13 TeV, recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider over the period from 2015 to 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. Measurements are performed within the fiducial phase-space defined by the presence of two b-jets and one electron and one muon of opposite charges. The differential cross-sections are corrected for detector effects and unfolded to the particle level. Results are compared with predictions from Monte Carlo event generators at next-to-leading order in perturbative quantum chromodynamics; overall the measurements are in reasonable agreement with several generator setups, although no single prediction is able to describe all measured distributions simultaneously. These measurements provide valuable constraints on the modelling of WbWb production and the interference between doubly resonant and singly resonant WbWb production.