High-energy vector boson scattering after the Higgs boson discovery

Abstract

Weak vector-boson $W,Z$ scattering at high energy probes the Higgs sector and is most sensitive to any new physics associated with electroweak symmetry breaking. We show that in the presence of the 125 GeV Higgs boson, a conventional effective-theory analysis fails for this class of processes. We propose to extrapolate the effective-theory ansatz by an extension of the parameter-free $K$-matrix unitarization prescription, which we denote as direct $T$-matrix unitarization. We generalize this prescription to arbitrary nonperturbative models and describe the implementation as an asymptotically consistent reference model matched to the low-energy effective theory. We present exemplary numerical results for full six-fermion processes at the LHC.