Towards the HEFT-hedron: the complete set of positivity constraints at NLO

by Susobhan Chattopadhyay

Thursday 15 May 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

We present the complete set of positivity bounds on the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT)  at next-to-leading order (NLO). We identify the 15 operators that can be constrained by positivity, as they contribute to $s^2$-growth in the amplitude for longitudinal gauge-Higgs scattering, that is to all possible 2-to-2 scattering processes involving longitudinal gauge bosons,  $V_L = W_L^\pm, Z_L$, and the  Higgs boson, $h$. We find two sets of constraints: (i) specific linear combinations of CP-even Wilson coefficients (WCs) must be positive, and (ii) the magnitudes of some WCs---including all CP-odd ones---must be smaller than products of other CP-even WCs. We present our final constraints on the 15-dimensional HEFT space and show how known positivity bounds on the 3-dimensional space of dimension 8 SMEFT can be recovered from them. We find that only about $5\%$ of the parameter space for WCs of HEFT operators at NLO complies with these positivity constraints.  Additionally, we obtain double-sided bounds on these WCs by fully exploiting the implications of unitarity and $st$-crossing symmetry. For WCs contributing to the vector boson scattering process our final constraints are in most cases significantly stronger than the experimental ones. For the   $V_L V_L, hh \to hh$ and $V_LV_L, hh \to V_Lh$ process, there are no reported experimental limits and our theoretical constraints provide the first  bounds.