Measurement of electroweak WZ boson production and search for new physics in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC

A measurement of the simultaneous production of a W and a Z boson (WZ production) via vector boson scattering is presented. The measurement is performed in the leptonic decay modes WZ --> lvl'l', where l, l' indicate an electron or muon. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider collected with the Compact Muon Solenoid detector and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb-1. The WZ plus two jet production cross section is measured in fiducial regions with enhanced contributions from electroweak (EW) production and found to be consistent with standard model predictions. The EW WZ production in association with two jets is measured with an observed (expected) significance of 2.2 (2.5) standard deviations. Results are also interpreted in terms of physics beyond the standard model modifying the interactions of the W and Z bosons. Constraints on charged Higgs boson production and on anomalous quartic gauge couplings in terms of dimension-eight effective field theory operators are presented.