Fermion masses in emergent electroweak symmetry breaking

Abstract

We consider the generation of fermion masses in an emergent model of electroweak symmetry breaking with composite W,Z gauge bosons. A universal bulk fermion profile in a warped extra dimension is used for all fermion flavors. Electroweak symmetry is broken at the UV (or Planck) scale where boundary mass terms are added to generate the fermion flavor structure. This leads to flavor-dependent nonuniversality in the gauge couplings. The effects are suppressed for the light fermion generations but are enhanced for the top quark where the \( Zt\bar{t} \) and \( Wt\bar{b} \) couplings can deviate at the 10–20% level in the minimal setup. By the AdS/CFT correspondence our model implies that electroweak symmetry is not a fundamental gauge symmetry. Instead the Standard Model with massive fermions and W,Z gauge bosons is an effective chiral Lagrangian for some underlying confining strong dynamics at the TeV scale, where mass is generated without a Higgs mechanism.