The intermediate Higgs

Abstract

Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weakly coupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. The former suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations to radiative corrections, while the latter presents potential discrepancies with precision electroweak physics. Here we present a framework for electroweak symmetry breaking which interpolates between these two paradigms, and mitigates their faults. As in Little Higgs theories, the Higgs is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson, potentially composite. The cutoff sensitivity of the one loop top quark contribution to the effective potential is canceled by contributions from additional vector-like quarks, and the cutoff can naturally be higher than in the minimal Standard Model. Unlike the Little Higgs models, the cutoff sensitivity from one loop gauge contributions is not canceled. However, such gauge contributions are naturally small as long as the cutoff is below 6 TeV. Precision electroweak corrections are suppressed relative to those of Technicolor or generic Little Higgs theories. In some versions of the intermediate scenario, the Higgs mass is computable in terms of the masses of these additional fermions and the Nambu-Goldstone Boson decay constant. In addition to the Higgs, new scalar and pseudoscalar particles are typically present at the weak scale.