Effective field theory: A modern approach to anomalous couplings

•We discuss the advantages of effective field theories compared to anomalous couplings.•We show that one need not be concerned with unitarity violation at high energy.•We discuss the application of effective field theory to weak boson physics.

We advocate an effective field theory approach to anomalous couplings. The effective field theory approach is the natural way to extend the standard model such that the gauge symmetries are respected. It is general enough to capture any physics beyond the standard model, yet also provides guidance as to the most likely place to see the effects of new physics. The effective field theory approach also clarifies that one need not be concerned with the violation of unitarity in scattering processes at high energy. We apply these ideas to pair production of electroweak vector bosons.