Validation of the background estimation in measurements of photon-induced $WW$ production using $pp \to WZ$ events

The investigation of the self-coupling of electroweak gauge bosons opens up a broad field of possibilities to confirm predictions of the Standard Model and its underlying gauge theory. At the same time, precise analyses of such processes create the potential to discover deviations from well known physics. One of these processes is the $\gamma\gamma \to WW$ process, which proceeds via quartic and trilinear self-coupling of photons and $W$ bosons. In the evaluation of experimental findings from the ATLAS detector at the LHC (CERN), the precise determination of the $q\bar{q}\to WW$ background is a particular challenge. In this work, the $q\bar{q}\to WW$ background estimation from the $\gamma\gamma \to WW$ analysis performed by the ATLAS Collaboration based on a Drell-Yan correction, is validated. For this purpose, a selection of events of the $q\bar{q}\to WZ$ process is performed and then compared to the reweighted theory-based event samples from the Monte Carlo simulation Powheg+Herwig7. Thus, a good match of this correction with high purity selected $WZ$ events is shown.