Determination of New Electroweak Parameters at the ILC - Sensitivity to New Physics

Abstract

We present a study of the sensitivity of an International Linear Collider (ILC) to electroweak parameters in the absence of a light Higgs boson. In particular, we consider those parameters that have been inaccessible at previous colliders, quartic gauge couplings. Within a generic effective-field theory context we analyze all processes that contain quasi-elastic weak-boson scattering, using complete six-fermion matrix elements in unweighted event samples, fast simulation of the ILC detector, and a multidimensional parameter fit of the set of anomalous couplings. The analysis does not rely on simplifying assumptions such as custodial symmetry or approximations such as the equivalence theorem. We supplement this by a similar new study of triple weak-boson production, which is sensitive to the same set of anomalous couplings. Including the known results on triple gauge couplings and oblique corrections, we thus quantitatively determine the indirect sensitivity of the ILC to new physics in the electroweak symmetry-breaking sector, conveniently parameterized by real or fictitious resonances in each accessible spin/isospin channel.