Building blocks of the flavourful SMEFT RG

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the flavour structure of the SMEFT one-loop anomalous dimension matrix at dimension 6, revealing patterns and selection rules that simplify understanding the RG flow and potential signs of new physics.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed flavour decomposition of the SMEFT anomalous dimension matrix, uncovering new flavour selection rules and block-diagonal structures that facilitate analysis of RG flow.

Findings

Identification of simple patterns in the anomalous dimension matrix.

Discovery of new flavour selection rules leading to block-diagonal structures.

Explicit calculations and phase space integrals provided for further analysis.

Abstract

A powerful aspect of effective field theories is connecting scales through renormalisation group (RG) flow. The anomalous dimension matrix of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) encodes clues to where to find relics of heavy new physics in data, but its unwieldy 2499-by-2499 size (at operator dimension 6) makes it difficult to draw general conclusions. In this paper, we study the flavour structure of the SMEFT one loop anomalous dimension matrix of dimension 6 current-current operators, a 1460-by-1460 submatrix. We take an on-shell approach, laying bare simple patterns by factorising the entries of the matrix into their gauge, kinematic and flavour parts. We explore the properties of different diagram topologies, and make explicit the connection between the IR-finiteness of certain diagrams and their gauge and flavour structure. Through a completely general flavour decomposition of the Wilson coefficient matrices, we uncover new flavour selection rules, from which small subsystems emerge which mix almost exclusively amongst themselves. We show that, for example, if we neglect all Yukawa couplings except for that of the top quark, the selection rules produce block diagonalisation within the current-current operators in which the largest block is a 61-by-61 matrix. We provide all the ingredients of the calculations in comprehensive appendices, including SM and SMEFT helicity amplitudes, and explicit results for phase space integrals and gauge contractions. This deconstruction of the matrix, and its resulting block-diagonalisation, provides a first step to understanding the IR-relevant directions in the SMEFT parameter space, hence closing in on natural places for heavy new physics to make itself known.