We make use of the language of non-linear realizations to analyze
electro-weak symmetry breaking scenarios in which a light dilaton emerges from
the breaking of a nearly conformal strong dynamics, and compare the
phenomenology of the dilaton to that of the well motivated light composite
Higgs scenario. We argue that -- in addition to departures in the
decay/production rates into massless gauge bosons mediated by the conformal
anomaly -- characterizing features of the light dilaton scenario (as well as
other scenarios admitting a light CP-even scalar not directly related to the
breaking of the electro-weak symmetry) are off-shell events at high invariant
mass involving two longitudinally polarized vector bosons and a dilaton, and
tree-level flavor violating processes. Accommodating both electro-weak
precision measurements and flavor constraints appears especially challenging in
the ambiguous scenario in which the Higgs and the dilaton fields strongly mix.
We show that warped higgsless models of electro-weak symmetry breaking are
explicit and tractable realizations of this limiting case.
The relation between the naive radion profile often adopted in the study of
holographic realizations of the light dilaton scenario and the actual dynamical
dilaton field is clarified in the Appendix.Comment: 21 page
