Chiral methods at the electroweak scale

TL;DR

This paper reviews the effective field theory approach to dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking, emphasizing chiral methods, and discusses its relevance for Higgs physics and LHC phenomenology.

Contribution

It introduces chiral dimensions in EFT for electroweak symmetry breaking and connects the $$ formalism with experimental Higgs coupling analyses.

Findings

EFT framework recovers the Standard Model in a specific limit

Embedding $$ formalism into EFT provides a QFT foundation for Higgs coupling studies

Systematic improvements from rate-based to distribution-based analyses are outlined

Abstract

I review the main features of the effective field theory (EFT) behind scenarios of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking, placing particular emphasis on the systematics and the parallels that can be drawn with Chiral Perturbation Theory. The notion of chiral dimensions will be introduced and shown to be the right tool to describe nonlinear expansions. I will also discuss why such an EFT is of interest in phenomenological studies at the LHC. The most important aspect is that the EFT is engineered to recover the Standard Model in a particular limit, and therefore provides a general framework to test the Higgs hypothesis. Additionally, I will argue that the $\kappa$ formalism used currently by experimental collaborations to study Higgs couplings at the LHC can actually be embedded into this EFT. This not only gives the $\kappa$ parametrization a solid QFT foundation but also shows the way to improve it systematically, and in particular how to upgrade analyses on Higgs processes from the level of rates to the level of distributions.