Longitudinal WW scattering in light of the "higgs boson" discovery

Abstract

WW scattering is dominated at high energies by their longitudinal components, which are the most sensitive to the nature of the electroweak symmetry breaking. Prior to the discovery at the LHC of a Higgs-like particle, unitarization tools were extensively used to show that, in the absence of a light Higgs boson, new resonances resulting from the would-be strongly interacting electroweak sector would appear, and furthermore these techniques would approximately predict their masses, widths, and signal strengths. With the discovery of a Higgs-like particle now firmly established, we reinvestigate these techniques assuming this particle couples exactly as in the standard model (SM), but still being open to the possibility of an extended symmetry breaking sector. While the SM itself is free from problems with perturbative unitarity in the electroweak sector, "anomalous" self-couplings of the vector bosons - low-energy remnants of such higher-energy symmetry breaking sectors - are easily shown to reintroduce them. We demonstrate how new resonances should still appear in the scattering of electroweak vector bosons after imposing constraints from unitarity, and we discuss their ability to be probed with current and future LHC data. © 2013 American Physical Society.