We consider the general chiral effective action which parametrizes the nonlinear realization of the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry with a light Higgs boson and compute the one-loop ultraviolet divergences coming from Higgs and electroweak Goldstone fluctuations using the background field method. The renormalization of the divergences is carried out through operators of next-to-leading order in the chiral counting, i.e., of $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$. Being of the same order in power counting, the logarithmic corrections linked to these divergences can be as important as the tree-level contributions from the $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$ operators and must be accounted for in the phenomenological analysis of experimental data. Deviations in the $\mathcal{O}(p^2)$ (leading-order) couplings with respect to the Standard Model values, e.g., in the $h\to WW$ coupling, would generate contributions from the one-loop chiral logarithms computed in this work to a vast variety of observables, which do not have a counterpart in the conventional electroweak effective theory with a linearly transforming Higgs complex doublet.

• Received 6 July 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.074005