Low-energy signals of strongly-coupled electroweak symmetry-breaking scenarios

TL;DR

This paper explores how strongly-coupled electroweak symmetry-breaking models leave low-energy signals in effective couplings, providing potential signatures for future experiments to identify the nature of new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to analyze low-energy imprints of heavy states in strongly-coupled electroweak symmetry-breaking scenarios using effective field theory.

Findings

Different heavy state quantum numbers lead to distinct low-energy coupling patterns.

Characteristic correlations in couplings can help identify underlying heavy states.

Predictions can be refined with mild assumptions about the ultraviolet completion.

Abstract

The non-observation of new particles at the LHC suggests the existence of a mass gap above the electroweak scale. This situation is adequately described through a general electroweak effective theory with the established fields and Standard Model symmetries. Its couplings contain all information about the unknown short-distance dynamics which is accessible at low energies. We consider a generic strongly-coupled scenario of electroweak symmetry breaking, with heavy states above the gap, and analyze the imprints that its lightest bosonic excitations leave on the effective Lagrangian couplings. Different quantum numbers of the heavy states imply different patterns of low-energy couplings, with characteristic correlations which could be identified in future data samples. The predictions can be sharpened with mild assumptions about the ultraviolet behaviour of the underlying fundamental theory.