Going Beyond the Minimal Composite Higgs Model

If electroweak symmetry breaking arises via strong dynamics, electroweak precision tests and flavour physics experiments suggest that the minimal model should closely resemble the Standard Model at the LHC. I describe two directions going beyond the minimal model that result in radically different physics at the LHC. One direction extends the Higgs sector and the other involves composite leptoquark states.Comment: 5 pp.; contribution to the proceedings of Moriond 2010: EW Interactions and Unified Theorie

Anomaly Holography

We consider, in the effective field theory context, anomalies of gauge field theories on a slice of a five-dimensional, Anti-de Sitter geometry and their four-dimensional, holographic duals. A consistent effective field theory description can always be found, notwithstanding the presence of the anomalies and without modifying the degrees of freedom of the theory. If anomalies do not vanish, the d=4 theory contains additional pseudoscalar states, which are either present in the low-energy theory as physical, light states, or are eaten by (would-be massless) gauge bosons. We show that the pseudoscalars ensure that global anomalies of the four-dimensional dual satisfy the 't Hooft matching condition and comment on the relevance for warped models of electroweak symmetry breaking.Comment: 26 pages, references adde

Improved Higgs Naturalness with Supersymmetry

We present a supersymmetric model of electroweak symmetry-breaking exhibiting improved naturalness, wherein the stop mass can be pushed beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider without unnatural fine tuning. This implies that supersymmetry may still solve the hierarchy problem, even if it eludes detection at the LHC.Comment: 4 pp., to appear in Proceedings of SUSY06, the 14th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions, UC Irvine, California, 12-17 June 200

Superpotentials for Gauge and Conformal Supergravity Backgrounds

Effective superpotentials obtained by integrating out matter in super Yang-Mills and conformal supergravity backgrounds in N=1 SUSY theories are considered. The pure gauge and supergravity contributions (generalizing Veneziano-Yankielowicz terms) are derived by considering the case with matter fields in the fundamental representation of the gauge group. These contributions represent quantum corrections to the tree-level Yang-Mills and conformal supergravity actions. The classical equations of motion following from the conformal supergravity action require the background to be (super)conformally flat. This condition is unchanged by quantum corrections to the effective superpotential, irrespective of the matter content of the theory.Comment: 12 pages, no figure