Anomalous gauge-boson couplings and the Higgs-boson mass

Abstract

We study anomalous gauge-boson couplings induced by a locally SU(2) × U(1) invariant effective Lagrangian containing ten operators of dimension six built from boson fields of the standard model (SM) before spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB). After SSB some operators lead to new three- and four-gauge-boson interactions, some contribute to the diagonal and off-diagonal kinetic terms of the gauge bosons, to the kinetic term of the Higgs boson and to the mass terms of the W and Z bosons. This requires a renormalisation of the gauge-boson fields, which, in turn, modifies the charged- and neutral-current interactions, although none of the additional operators contain fermion fields. Also the Higgs field must be renormalised. Bounds on the anomalous couplings from electroweak precision measurements at LEP and SLC are correlated with the Higgs-boson mass m H . Rather moderate values of anomalous couplings allow m H up to 500 GeV. At a future linear collider the triple-gauge-boson couplings $\gamma WW$ and ZWW can be measured in the reaction $e^ + e^- \rightarrow WW$ . We compare three approaches to anomalous gauge-boson couplings: the form-factor approach, the addition of anomalous-coupling terms to the SM Lagrangian after and, as outlined above, before SSB. The translation of the bounds on the couplings from one approach to another is not straightforward. We show that it can be done for the process $e^ + e^- \rightarrow WW$ by defining new effective $\gamma WW$ and ZWW couplings.