Chiral freedom and electroweak symmetry breaking

Abstract

Antisymmetric tensor fields with chiral couplings to quarks and leptons may induce spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking in a model without a fundamental Higgs scalar. No microscopic local mass term for the chiral tensors or chirons is allowed by the symmetries and our model exhibits only dimensionless couplings. However, the chiral couplings are asymptotically free and therefore generate a mass scale where they grow large. We argue that at this scale mass terms for the chiral tensor fields are generated nonperturbatively---the chirons appear as new massive spin-one particles. Furthermore a scalar top-antitop condensate forms, giving mass to the weak gauge bosons and fermions. In this scenario the longstanding gauge hierarchy problem finds a solution similar to the mass generation in QCD. We compute the general form of the effective action for the chiral tensors and sketch several possibilities of their detection at LHC or through precision tests of the electroweak standard model.