A (Critical) Review of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking PoS(ICHEP 2010)536 Csaba Csáki Institute of High Energy Phenomenology Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA E-mail:
[email protected] An overview of models of electroweak symmetry breaking is presented. First we explain the little hierarchy problem and show how it is manifested in supersymmetric theories. Then ways of avoiding the little hierarchy in SUSY models is shown, which fall into two classes: hiding the higgs at LEP or increasing the quartic self coupling of the higgs, both of which call for extensions of the MSSM. In the second half strongly interacting theories of electroweak symmetry breaking are reviewed, including technicolor and monopole condensation models. Particular attention is paid to warped extra dimensional theories and its cousins (higgsless, little higgs and composite higgs models. 35th International Conference of High Energy Physics - ICHEP2010, July 22-28, 2010 Paris France c Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence. http://pos.sissa.it/ A (Critical) Review of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking 1. The SM, big vs. little hierarchy The standard Higgs mechanism is an eminently successful description of electroweak sym- metry breaking. The analysis of electroweak precision data suggest that there is a light weakly coupled higgs boson, below about 200 GeV. However, it is very hard to understand how such an el- ementary higgs would remain light. Examining quantum corrections one finds that the higgs mass is quadratically sensitive to any new physics: 2 2 g 2 Dm ∼ L (1.1) PoS(ICHEP 2010)536 H 16p2 where L is the scale of new physics.