Resonances at the LHC beyond the Higgs: The Scalar/Tensor Case

TL;DR

This paper develops a formalism to describe scalar and tensor resonances beyond the Higgs boson at the LHC, ensuring theoretical consistency and unitarity, with applications to current and future collider data.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized Stuckelberg formalism for tensor resonances and provides a unitarized amplitude framework applicable to both strongly and weakly coupled models.

Findings

Calculated scattering amplitudes for vector-boson and Higgs pairs.

Provided numerical results for LHC resonant vector-boson scattering.

Ensured amplitudes are well-behaved across phase space.

Abstract

We study in a bottom-up approach the theoretically consistent description of additional resonances in the electroweak sector beyond the discovered Higgs boson as simplified models. We focus on scalar and tensor resonances. Our formalism is suited for strongly coupled models, but can also be applied to weakly interacting theories. The spurious degrees of freedom of tensor resonances that would lead to bad high-energy behavior are treated using a generalization of the Stuckelberg formalism. We calculate scattering amplitudes for vector-boson and Higgs boson pairs. The high-energy region is regulated by the T-matrix unitarization procedure, leading to amplitudes that are well behaved on the whole phase space. We present numerical results for complete partonic processes that involve resonant vector-boson scattering, for the current and upcoming runs of LHC.