Universal non-oblique corrections in Higgsless models and beyond

Recently Barbieri et al. have introduced a formalism to express the deviations of electroweak interactions from their Standard Model forms in 'universal' theories, i.e., theories in which the corrections due to new physics can be expressed solely by modifications to the two-point correlation function of electroweak gauge currents of fermions. The parameters introduced by these authors are defined by the properties of the correlation functions at zero momentum, and differ from the quantities calculated by examining the on-shell properties of the electroweak gauge bosons. In this Letter we discuss the relationship between the zero-momentum and on-shell parameters. In addition, we present the results of a calculation of these zero-momentum parameters in an arbitrary Higgsless model in which the low-energy ρ parameter is one and which can be deconstructed to a linear chain of SU(2) groups adjacent to a chain of U(1) groups. Our results demonstrate the importance of the universal 'non-oblique' corrections which are present and elucidate the relationships among various calculations of electroweak quantities in these models. Our expressions for these zero-momentum parameters depend only on the spectrum of heavy vector-boson masses; therefore, the minimum size of the deviations present in these models is related to the upper bound on the heavy vector-boson masses derived from unitarity. We find that these models are disfavored by precision electroweak data, independent of any assumptions about the background metric or the behavior of the bulk coupling