Search for anomalous electroweak production of vector boson pairs in association with two jets in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV

A search for anomalous electroweak production of WW, WZ, and ZZ boson pairs in association with two jets in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 13 TeV at the LHC is reported. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb$^{-1}$ collected with the CMS detector. Events are selected by requiring two jets with large rapidity separation and invariant mass, one or two leptons (electrons or muons), and a W or Z boson decaying hadronically. Constraints on the structure of quartic vector boson interactions in the framework of dimension-8 effective field theory operators are reported. Stringent limits on parameters of the effective field theory operators are obtained. The observed 95% confidence level limits for the S0, M0, and T0 operators are $-$2.7 $<$ f$_{\mathrm{S0}}/ \Lambda^{4}<$ 2.7, $-$1.0$<$f$_{\mathrm{M0}}/ \Lambda^{4}<$ 1.0, and $-$0.17$<$f$_{\mathrm{T0}}/ \Lambda^{4}<$ 0.16, in units of TeV$^{-4}$. Constraints are also reported on the product of the cross section and branching fraction for vector boson fusion production of charged Higgs bosons as a function of mass from 600 to 2000 GeV. The results are interpreted in the context of the Georgi-Machacek model.