Trilinear Neutral Gauge Boson Couplings in Effective Theories

Abstract

We list all the lowest dimension effective operators inducing off-shell trilinear neutral gauge boson couplings Z-Z-Photon, Z-Photon-Photon, and ZZZ within the effective Lagrangian approach, both in the linear and nonlinear realizations of the SU(2)_{L} X U(1)_Y gauge symmetry. In the linear scenario we find that these couplings can be generated only by dimension eight operators necessarily including the Higgs boson field, whereas in the nonlinear case they are induced by dimension six operators. We consider the impact of these couplings on some precision measurements such as the magnetic and electric dipole moments of fermions, as well as the Z boson rare decay Z -> neutrino+antineutrino+ photon. If the underlying new physics is of a decoupling nature, it is not expected that trilinear neutral gauge boson couplings may affect considerably any of these observables. On the contrary, it is just in the nonlinear scenario where these couplings have the more promising prospects of being perceptible through high precision experiments.