Gauge-invariant longitudinal modes in the Herwig 7 electroweak parton shower

A bstract Longitudinal electroweak (EW) gauge bosons are the most technically delicate ingredient of EW parton showers: in the broken Standard Model, the gauge component of a longitudinal polarisation does not cancel diagram by diagram, but is related by Ward identities to amplitudes with an insertion of the associated would-be Goldstone field. Building on the default Herwig 7 treatment based on a subtraction-defined longitudinal current, we construct a gauge-invariant scheme in which the subtraction remainder is retained as a well-defined contribution and completed by a Ward-identity-fixed Goldstone-matching term. We derive helicity-resolved building blocks and compact quasi-collinear splitting kernels for q → q ′ V and V → V ′ V ′′ branchings, and implement the scheme in Herwig 7 as a switchable alternative to the default basis. The completion leaves the transverse sector unchanged and modifies only longitudinal entries through controlled symmetry-breaking terms, including Yukawa-sensitive contributions in massive-fermion channels. In shower-level studies, we find that the default and gauge-invariant prescriptions coincide at high evolution scales, while differing at lower scales precisely in channels where symmetry breaking is active. Exclusive single-emission observables can moreover display non-monotonic scheme dependence once Sudakov suppression and kinematic constraints are accounted for. A first multi-emission LHC-like study confirms numerical stability and yields controlled, interpretable shifts in observables that probe propagating EW shower currents, whereas quantities dominated by promptly contracted, near on-shell vector-boson matrix elements remain largely unchanged.