The Strongly Interacting $WW$ System: Gold--Plated Modes

TL;DR

The paper addresses how to detect a strongly interacting electroweak symmetry breaking sector through longitudinal WW scattering at TeV-scale hadron colliders. It keyly combines exact SM calculations with EFT-based beyond-SM models, employing forward jet-tagging and central jet vetoes to suppress irreducible backgrounds and extract the $W_LW_L$ signal in gold-plated leptonic channels. By exploring resonant (spin-zero and spin-one) and nonresonant scenarios within chiral Lagrangians, the work shows viable signals in multiple channels and demonstrates that the relative strengths across $ZZ$, $W^+W^-$, $W^+Z$, and $W^+W^+$ can distinguish different underlying dynamics. The findings indicate that both the SSC and LHC could probe, and potentially discriminate among, a broad class of strong EWSB scenarios using leptonic final states with feasible luminosities, highlighting the importance of jet tagging and veto strategies for backgrounds control.

Abstract

In this paper we survey the signals and backgrounds for a strongly-interacting electroweak symmetry breaking sector at hadron supercolliders in the TeV region. We study the process pp->WWX, and compute the rates for the ``gold-plated'' channels, where W^{+/-}->l^{+/-}νand Z -> l^+l^- (l = e,μ), for a wide variety of models. Using a forward jet-tag, a central jet-veto and a back-to-back lepton cut to suppress the Standard Model backgrounds, we demonstrate that the SSC and LHC have substantial sensitivity to strong interactions in the electroweak symmetry breaking sector.