Scattering of W and Z bosons at high-energy lepton colliders

We present a new study of quasi-elastic W and Z scattering processes in high-energy e⁺e⁻ collisions, based on and extrapolating the low-energy effective theory which extends the standard model with a 125\;GeV Higgs boson. We parameterize deviations in the low-energy range in terms of the dimension-eight operators that arise in the effective theory. Smoothly extending this to higher energy, we study a set of simplified models of new physics in W / Z scattering, (1) a structureless extrapolation of the effective theory, and (2) scalar and tensor resonance multiplets. The high-energy asymptotics of all models is regulated by a universal unitarization procedure. This enables us to provide benchmark scenarios which can be meaningfully evaluated off shell and in exclusive event samples, and to determine the sensitivity of an e⁺e⁻ collider to the model parameters. We analyze the longitudinal vector-boson scattering modes, where we optimize the cuts for the fiducial cross section for different collider scenarios. Here, we choose energy stages of 1.0, 1.4 and 3 TeV, as motivated by the extendability of the ILC project and the staging scenario of the CLIC project.