LOW-ENERGY CONSTRAINTS ON ELECTROWEAK 3 GAUGE BOSON COUPLINGS

Novel strong interactions in the electroweak bosonic sector may induce SU(2) X U(1) gauge-invariant effective interactions between the Higgs doublet field and the electroweak gauge bosons which lead to anomalous WWZ and WW-gamma vertices, once the Higgs field acquires a vacuum expectation value. We consider observable one-loop effects, which are induced by the dimension-six operators (D(mu)PHI)dagger gT(i)W(i-mu-nu)(D(nu)PHI) and (D(mu)PHI)dagger g'YB(mu-nu)(D(nu)PHI). Gauge invariance renders such effects at most logarithmically divergent, as required by decoupling. Present bounds on the anomalous gauge boson couplings imply modest constraints on the size of new physics signals in W+W- production at LEP II.