Effective Field Theory: A Modern Approach to Anomalous Couplings

TL;DR

This paper promotes an effective field theory framework for analyzing anomalous couplings, emphasizing its advantages in extending the standard model while respecting gauge symmetries and guiding new physics searches.

Contribution

It introduces an effective field theory methodology for anomalous couplings, clarifying its benefits over traditional approaches and applying it to electroweak vector boson pair production.

Findings

Effective field theory captures potential new physics effects.

Clarifies that unitarity violation concerns are mitigated.

Provides a systematic approach to anomalous coupling analysis.

Abstract

We advocate an effective field theory approach to anomalous couplings. The effective field theory approach is the natural way to extend the standard model such that the gauge symmetries are respected. It is general enough to capture any physics beyond the standard model, yet also provides guidance as to the most likely place to see the effects of new physics. The effective field theory approach also clarifies that one need not be concerned with the violation of unitarity in scattering processes at high energy. We apply these ideas to pair production of electroweak vector bosons.