Precision Electroweak Analysis after the Higgs Boson Discovery

Abstract

Until recently precision electroweak computations were fundamentally uncertain due to lack of knowledge about the existence of the Standard Model Higgs boson and its mass. For this reason substantial calculational machinery had to be carried along for each calculation that changed the Higgs boson mass and other parameters of the Standard Model. Now that the Higgs boson is discovered and its mass is known to within a percent, we are able to compute reliable semi-analytic expansions of electroweak observables. We present results of those computations in the form of expansion formulae. In addition to the convenience of having these expressions, we show how the approach makes investigating new physics contributions to precision electroweak observables much easier.