Superconformal technicolor: Models and phenomenology

Abstract

In supersymmetric theories with a strong conformal sector, soft supersymmetry breaking naturally gives rise to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in the strong sector at the TeV scale. We construct and analyze models where such a sector dynamically breaks electroweak symmetry, and take the first steps in studying their phenomenology. We consider two scenarios, one where the strong dynamics induces vacuum expectation values for elementary Higgs fields, and another where the strong dynamics is solely responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking. In both cases there is no fine-tuning required to explain the absence of a Higgs boson below the LEP bound, solving the supersymmetry naturalness problem. Quark and lepton masses arise from conventional Yukawa couplings to elementary Higgs bosons, so there are no additional flavor-changing effects associated with the strong dynamics. A good precision electroweak fit can be obtained because the strong sector is an $SU(2)$ gauge theory with one weak doublet, and has adjustable parameters that control the violation of custodial symmetry. In addition to the standard supersymmetry signals, these models predict production of multiple heavy standard model particles ($t$, $W$, $Z$, and $b$) from decays of resonances in the strong sector. The strong sector has no approximate parity symmetry, so $WW$ scattering is unitarized by states that can decay to $WWW$ as well as $WW$.