Speaker
Description
Colliders continue to push our understanding of electroweak (EW) interactions to ever higher energies. At high energies ($E \gg m_W,\,m_Z,\,m_h$), the broken EW theory is expected to converge to the unbroken theory. This is the electroweak restoration regime. We investigate how linear and non-linear realizations of the EW symmetry can be probed by comparing the relative longitudinal diboson production rates: $q \bar{q}'\rightarrow V_LV'_L$ and $q \bar{q}'\rightarrow V_Lh$. For linear and non-linear physics beyond the Standard Model, we consider the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) and the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT), respectively. We present a general analysis of these amplitudes in the SM, SMEFT, and HEFT, and investigate how the ratios of these different cross sections are sensitive to linear vs. non-linear realization EW symmetry breaking. We find that the ratios of $W^\pm_LZ_L$ and $W^\pm_L h$ rates are particularly theoretically clean since these are expected to converge to one for the SM and SMEFT but not necessarily HEFT. We provide current LHC sensitivities to probing the SMEFT vs. HEFT operators and project to the high luminosity LHC.