Polarization and correlation effects in $γγ\to W^-W^+$ at Next-to-Leading-Order Electroweak Accuracy

Abstract

We study the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak (EW) corrections to the polarization and correlation of $W$ boson pairs produced through photon-photon fusion in proton-proton ultra-peripheral collisions at the LHC, with both $W$ bosons decaying leptonically. The azimuthal correlation distributions of the charged leptons, which receive no contribution from anomalous quartic gauge couplings (AQGCs) at linear order, are perturbatively stable at the 0.40\% level, whereas individual correlation coefficient $C_{2,2}$ receives relative corrections of up to $-33.84\%$. Some of correlation coefficients that vanish at leading order (LO) in the Standard Model but are sensitive to AQGCs acquire non-zero one-loop values of order $10^{-4}-10^{-3}$. We quantify the region of the ($a_0/Λ^2,a_c/Λ^2$) plane in which these loop-induced baselines compete with the AQGC contributions and find that, while irrelevant at the current experimental sensitivity, they must be included once the correlation coefficients are measured at the per-mille level.