Speaker
Description
SMEFT interpretations at the LHC typically rely on a truncation at linear dimension six, while experimental sensitivity is increasingly driven by high-energy regions where contributions grow with energy and higher-dimensional effects become important. I will present a framework that addresses both issues. First, we introduce an energy-based power counting that organizes SMEFT contributions according to their scaling with energy, identifying the subset of operators that dominate in the kinematic tails and are therefore most relevant for experimental searches. Second, we show that higher-order contributions at the observable-level, particularly, quadratic dimension-six terms do not introduce an intractable number of degrees of freedom: although they depend on many Wilson coefficient combinations, their impact on differential distributions spans only a small number of independent shapes. Using simulated EFT predictions, we extract these shapes and map them onto a minimal set of nuisance parameters, enabling a consistent and practical treatment of higher-order EFT truncation uncertainties in experimental analyses while preserving sensitivity to energy-enhanced new physics effects.