Studies of strong electroweak symmetry breaking at photon colliders.

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the studies of strongly interacting electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) at photon colliders, via photon splitting into a W pair followed by longitudinal W-boson scattering, could be possible. Here we present a signal-background analysis for the scattering channels ${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{+}$${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}}$\ensuremath{\rightarrow}${\mathit{Z}}_{\mathit{L}}$${\mathit{Z}}_{\mathit{L}}$ and ${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{+}$${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}}$\ensuremath{\rightarrow}${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{+}$${\mathit{W}}_{\mathit{L}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}}$ with the background coming from the standard model (SM) production of \ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}WWZZ and WWWW, respectively. We illustrate the analysis using the SM with a heavy Higgs boson (${\mathit{m}}_{\mathit{H}}$\ensuremath{\approxeq}1 TeV) to represent a typical strongly interacting EWSB model and the SM with a light Higgs boson (${\mathit{m}}_{\mathit{H}}$\ensuremath{\approxeq}0.1 TeV) to represent the background. We come up with a set of kinematic acceptance to enhance the signal-to-background ratio. The extension of the kinematic acceptance to other strongly interacting EWSB models is then trivial, and the signal cross sections for various EWSB models are calculated. We found that it is very feasible to probe the EWSB sector at a photon collider of center-of-mass energy of 2 TeV with a luminosity of just 10 ${\mathrm{fb}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}1}$.