Central exclusive production of W boson pairs in pp collisions at the LHC in hadronic and semi-leptonic final states

We present a phenomenology study on central exclusive production of W+W- boson pairs in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at 14TeV using the forward proton detectors, such as the ATLAS Forward Proton or the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer detectors. Final states where at least one of the W bosons decay hadronically in a large-radius jet are considered. The latter extends previous efforts that consider solely leptonic final states. A measurement of exclusive W+ W- also allows us to further constrain anomalous quartic gauge boson interactions between photons and W bosons. Expected limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings a(0,C)(W) associated to dimension-six effective operators are derived for the hadronic, semi-leptonic, and leptonic final states. It is found that the couplings can be probed down to one-dimensional values of a(0)(W) = 3.7x10(-7) GeV-2 and aWC = 9.2x10(-7) GeV-2 at 95% CL at an integrated luminosity of 300 fb(-1) by combining all final states, compared to values of about a(0)(W) = 4x10(-6) GeV-2 and a(C)(W) = 1 x 10(-5) GeV-2 at 95% CL expected for the leptonic channel alone.