Evidence for proton-tagged, central semi-exclusive production of high-mass muon pairs at 13 TeV with the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer

CMS Physics Analysis Summaries
Report number	CMS-PAS-PPS-17-001 ; TOTEM-NOTE-2017-003
Title	Evidence for proton-tagged, central semi-exclusive production of high-mass muon pairs at 13 TeV with the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer
Corporate author(s)	CMS Collaboration ; TOTEM Collaboration
Collaboration	CMS Collaboration ; TOTEM Collaboration
Accelerator/Facility, Experiment	CERN LHC ; CMS CERN LHC ; TOTEM
Abstract	The process $pp \rightarrow p \mu^+\mu^- p^{()}$ has been observed at the LHC for dimuon masses larger than $110~\mathrm{GeV}$ in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13~\mathrm{TeV}$. Here $p^{()}$ indicates that the second proton is undetected, and either remains intact or dissociates into a low-mass state $p^{*}$. The scattered proton has been measured in the CMS-TOTEM Precision Proton Spectrometer (CT-PPS), which operated for the first time in 2016. The measurement is based on an integrated luminosity of approximately $10~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ collected in regular, high-luminosity fills. A total of 12 candidates with $m(\mu\mu) > 110~\mathrm{GeV}$, and matching forward proton kinematics, is observed. This corresponds to an excess of more than four standard deviations over the background. The spectrometer and its operation are described, along with the data and background estimation. The present results constitute the first evidence of this process at such masses. They also demonstrate that CT-PPS performs as expected.
Other source	Inspire
Related	superseded by: CERN-EP-2018-014
Email contact: cms-totem-phys-conveners-pps@cern.ch Fulltext in PDF Figure_008-b Figure_008-a Figure_001-c Figure_001-b Figure_010-a Figure_009 Figure_011 Figure_007 Figure_006 Figure_005 Figure_004 Figure_003 Figure_002 Figure_001-a Figure_010-b Additional information for the analysis (restricted access)