Probing Electroweak Symmetry Breaking via WW Interactions at High Energy Colliders

We classify the sensitivities of the future high energy hadron and electron colliders, such as the LHC and the future Linear Colliders, to probing all the next-to-leading order (NLO) bosonic operators for studying the electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) mechanism. We first develop a power counting rule (a generalization of Weinberg’s counting method for the nonlinear sigma model) for the electroweak theories formulated by the chiral Lagrangian. Then, we formulate the Longitudinal-Goldstone Boson Equivalence Theorem as a physical criterion to discriminate the scattering processes that are not sensitive to the EWSB sector. The “complementarity” of different scattering processes via different colliders for a complete probe of all these NLO effective operators is demonstrated.