Lectures on walking technicolor, holography and gauge/gravity dualities

Dynamical electro-weak symmetry breaking is an appealing, strongly-coupled alternative to the weakly-coupled models based on an elementary scalar field developing a vacuum expectation value. In the first two sections of this set of lectures, I summarize the arguments, based on low-energy phenomenology, supporting walking technicolor as a realistic realization of this idea. This pedagogical introduction to walking technicolor, and more generally to the physics of extensions of the standard model, makes extensive use of effective field theory arguments, symmetries and counting rules. The strongly-coupled nature of the underlying interactions, and the peculiar quasi-conformal behavior of the theory, require to use non-perturbative methods in order to address many fundamental questions within this framework. The recent development of gauge/gravity dualities provides an ideal set of such non-perturbative instruments. The remaining two sections illustrate the potential of these techniques with two technical examples, one within the bottom-up phenomenological approach to holography in five-dimensions, the other within a more systematic top-down construction derived from ten-dimensional type-IIB supergravity.Comment: 67 pages, 16 figures

A composite light scalar, electro-weak symmetry breaking and the recent LHC searches

We construct a model in which electro-weak symmetry breaking is induced by a strongly coupled sector, which is described in terms of a five-dimensional model in the spirit of the bottom-up approach to holography. We compute the precision electro-weak parameters, and identify regions of parameter space allowed by indirect tests. We compute the spectrum of scalar and vector resonances, which contains a set of parametrically light states that can be identified with the electroweak gauge bosons and a light dilaton. There is then a little desert, up to 2-3 TeV, where towers of resonances of the vector, axial-vector and scalar particles appear.Comment: Version accepted for publication. Two footnotes and one reference adde

Nearly Conformal Composite Higgs Model

We analyze a composite Higgs model based on the confining SU(3) gauge theory with Nf = 8 Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. This gauge theory has been studied on the lattice and shown to be well described by a dilaton effective field theory (EFT). Here we modify the EFT by assigning standard-model quantum numbers such that four of the composite pseudo-Nambu- Goldstone boson (pNGB) fields form the standard-model Higgs doublet, by coupling it to the top quark, and by adding to the potential a term that triggers electroweak symmetry breaking. The model contains a pNGB Higgs boson, a set of heavier pNGBs, and an approximate dilaton in the same mass range. We study the phenomenology of the model, and discuss the amount of tuning required to ensure consistency with current direct and indirect bounds on new physics, highlighting the role of the dilaton field