Holographic theories of electroweak symmetry breaking without a Higgs boson

Abstract

Recently, realistic theories of electroweak symmetry breaking have been constructed in which the electroweak symmetry is broken by boundary conditions imposed at a boundary of higher dimensional spacetime. These theories have equivalent 4D dual descriptions, in which the electroweak symmetry is dynamically broken by non-trivial infrared dynamics of some gauge interaction, whose coupling g and size N satisfy g^2N > 16pi^2. Such theories allow one to calculate electroweak radiative corrections, including the oblique parameters S, T and U, as long as g^2N/16pi^2 and N are large. We study how the duality between the 4D and 5D theories manifests itself in the computation of various physical quantities. In particular, we study a warped 5D theory where the electroweak symmetry is broken by boundary conditions at the infrared brane. We show that S exceeds the experimental bound if the minimal theory is in a weakly coupled regime. This requires either an extension of the model or departure from weak coupling. An interesting scenario is obtained if the gauge couplings in the 5D theory take the largest possible values -- the value suggested by naive dimensional analysis. We argue that such a theory can provide a potentially consistent picture for dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking: corrections to the electroweak observables are sufficiently small while realistic fermion masses are obtained without conflicting with bounds from flavor violation. The theory contains only the standard model quarks, leptons and gauge bosons below \sim 2 TeV, except for a possible light radion. At \sim 2 TeV increasingly broad string resonances appear. An analysis of top-quark phenomenology and flavor violation is also presented, which is applicable to both the weakly-coupled and strongly-coupled cases.