Effect of contact interactions on Higgs production at an e+e− collider

TeV scale new physics could affect physical processes at lower energies through non-renormalizable operators invariant under the SM gauge symmetry SU(3)c×SU(2)l×U(1)y. Recent data from SLC, LEP 1 and LEP II indicate that the scale associated with the chirality conserving operators involving leptons, scalars and gauge fields must be greater than 2–3 TeV. Whereas the scale for some of the chirality flipping operators can be as low as 365 GeV. We show that these operators can significantly affect the total cross-section for the process e+e−→HZ at LEP II and NLC 500.