A Pedagogical Review of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking Scenarios

Abstract

We review different avenues of electroweak symmetry breaking explored over the years. This constitutes a timely exercise as the world's largest and the highest energy particle accelerator, namely, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, has started running whose primary mission is to find the Higgs or some phenomena that mimic the effects of the Higgs, i.e. to unravel the mysteries of electroweak phase transition. In the beginning, we discuss the Standard Model Higgs mechanism. After that we review the Higgs sector of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Then we take up three relatively recent ideas: Little Higgs, Gauge-Higgs Unification, and Higgsless scenarios. For the latter three cases, we first present the basic ideas and restrict our illustration to some instructive toy models to provide an intuitive feel of the underlying dynamics, and then discuss, for each of the three cases, how more realistic scenarios are constructed and how to decipher their experimental signatures. Wherever possible, we provide enough pedagogical details, which the beginners might find useful.

45 pages, Review based on a series of lectures; v2: 63 pages, substantially expanded, references added, to appear in `Reports on Progress in Physics'

References in corpus (15)

• The Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model
• The Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model reviewed
• A Three Site Higgsless Model
• Collider Phenomenology of Gauge-Higgs Unification Scenarios in Warped Extra Dimensions
• Testing neutrino masses in little Higgs models via discovery of doubly charged Higgs at LHC
• Unanswered Questions in the Electroweak Theory
• Gauge-Higgs Unification at LHC
• Higgs Boson Mass From Gauge-Higgs Unification
• Multijet Discriminators for New Physics in Leptonic Signals at the LHC
• Holographic Methods and Gauge-Higgs Unification in Flat Extra Dimensions
• Window For Higgs Boson Mass From Gauge-Higgs Unification
• History of Supersymmetric Extensions of the Standard Model
• Theories for the Fermi Scale
• Electroweak Symmetry Breaking and BSM Physics (A Review)
• Gauge-Higgs Unification on Flat Space Revised

Cited by in corpus (20)

• A Unified Description of Translational Symmetry Breaking in Holography
• Alternatives to an Elementary Higgs
• Mixed sneutrino dark matter in light of the 2011 XENON and LHC results
• Extra Neutral Scalars with Vector-like Fermions at the LHC
• Higgs production as a probe of anomalous top couplings
• Precision measurements of the top quark mass from the Tevatron in the pre-LHC era
• Clockworked VEVs and Neutrino Mass
• Measurement of the top-quark mass in the lepton+jets channel using a matrix element technique with the CDF II detector
• Solar neutrinos, helicity effects and new affine gravity with torsion II
• Alternative search strategies for a BSM resonance fitting ATLAS diboson excess
• New Black Holes Solutions in a Modified Gravity
• Summary of Lepton Photon 2011
• Investigating the Electroweak Phase Transition with a Real Scalar Singlet at a Muon Collider
• Remarks on the first hundred years of superconductivity
• Improving Combinatorial Ambiguities of ttbar Events Using Neural Networks
• Electroweak Symmetry Breaking Beyond the Standard Model
• Weak Mixing Angle and Higgs Mass in Gauge-Higgs Unification Models with Brane Kinetic Terms
• Searches for phenomena beyond the Standard Model at the LHC with the ATLAS and CMS detectors
• Vector boson scattering and boundary conditions in Kaluza-Klein toy model
• Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking without classical fields: a Functional Renormalization Group approach