Unitarized HEFT for strongly interacting longitudinal electroweak gauge bosons with resonances

TL;DR

This paper develops unitarized Higgs Effective Field Theory methods to analyze strongly interacting vector boson scattering at the LHC, predicting resonances and providing tools for data interpretation.

Contribution

It introduces two unitarization techniques, IAM and N/D, for HEFT amplitudes, enabling the study of resonances in vector boson scattering channels.

Findings

Both unitarization methods produce similar results.

Resonance poles are identified in the scattering amplitudes.

The amplitudes can be used to interpret LHC data on vector boson interactions.

Abstract

Higgs Effective Field Theory can be used to study vector-boson elastic scattering at the high energies relevant for the LHC. For most of the parameter space, the scattering is strongly interacting, with the minimal Standard Model being a remarkable exception. From its one-loop treatment complemented with dispersion relations and the Equivalence Theorem, we derive two different unitarization methods which produce analytical amplitudes corresponding to different approximate solutions to the dispersion relations: the Inverse Amplitude method (IAM) and the N/D method. The partial waves obtained can show poles in the second Riemann sheet whose natural interpretation is that of dynamical resonances with masses and widths a function of the starting HEFT parameters. We compare the different unitarizations and we find that they are qualitatively, and in many cases quantitatively, very similar. However, for different reason it is more interesting to use one of the two methods depending on the particular channel for WW, ZZ, WZ, Zh, Wh or hh scattering. In this note we briefly describe the possible I and J channels for these reactions and give the unitarization method of choice in each case. The amplitudes obtained provide realistic resonant and nonresonant cross sections to be compared with and to be used for a proper interpretation of the LHC data.