Off-shell renormalization in the presence of dimension 6 derivative operators. Part I. General theory

The consistent recursive subtraction of UV divergences order by order in the loop expansion for spontaneously broken effective field theories with dimension-6 derivative operators is presented for an Abelian gauge group. We solve the Slavnov-Taylor identity to all orders in the loop expansion by homotopy techniques and a suitable choice of invariant field coordinates (named bleached variables) for the linearly realized gauge group. This allows one to disentangle the gauge-invariant contributions to off-shell 1-PI amplitudes from those associated with the gauge-fixing and (generalized) non-polynomial field redefinitions (that do appear already at one loop). The tools presented can be easily generalized to the non-Abelian case.