Boundaries of universal theories

Universal theories are a broad class of well-motivated microscopic dynamics of the electroweak sector that go beyond the Standard Model description. The long distance physics is described by electroweak parameters which correspond to local operators in the effective field theory. We show how unitarity and analyticity constrain the space of parameters. In particular, the W and Y parameters are constrained to be positive and are necessarily the leading terms in the low-energy expansion. We assess the impact of unitarity on the interpretation of Drell-Yan data. In passing, we uncover an unexpected Wilson coefficient transcendental cancellation at the O(<10−3) level.