Running away from the T-parameter solution to the W mass anomaly

Abstract

We show that it is essential to include renormalisation group (RG) effects for determining the SMEFT parameter space consistent with the CDF W-mass anomaly at the matching scale. This is because operators that are only weakly constrained--for instance those probed by diboson and Higgs data--can have a contribution to the W-boson mass via one-loop RG effects, that is comparable to the tree-level contribution of the much more strongly constrained operators related to electroweak precision observables. We RG evolve the low energy SMEFT parameter space consistent with the anomaly to the matching scale and find a much larger allowed region. In particular we find that it is possible to have a vanishing or even negative T -parameter at the matching scale. This will hopefully lead to a larger set of UV completions that can explain the anomaly. For the one-loop contributions to be important a relatively low new physics scale around 800 GeV is required. This enhances the possibility of probing this new physics in direct and indirect searches in the recent future.