A high-resolution version for printing - CP3-Origins

Roadmap
The centre is designed to cover, during its life-time, strategic areas of research orbiting around
the “Origin of Mass” problem which is the “trait d’union” connecting them:
• Electroweak Symmetry Breaking/Model Building
• Flavour and CP Physics
• Strong Interactions
In the following we review the research we have been involved in during the reporting period.
We plan to further extend our line or research below for the coming reporting year according to
the original work-plan and milestones.
Two staff members per research area will be the primary investigators according to their expertise.
We expect to involve two postdocs per area of research. There is sufficient flexibility within
this research structure to allow for the young researchers to pick the topic(s) which best suits
their interests. Within each research project introduced below we present the methodological
approach we will employ to achieve our goals.
Dynamical Electroweak Symmetry Breaking
A number of possible generalizations of the SM have been conceived. Such extensions are introduced
on the basis of one or more guiding principles or prejudices. We will introduce below
only the SM extensions on which we have worked and can achieve in a short period definite
and seminal results.
One of the intriguing options for explaining some of the puzzling features of the SM of particle
physics is to assume that a new force acts at the Fermi scale. This new force, commonly called
Technicolor – the high energy equivalent of ordinary superconductivity – leads to a natural explanation
of the origin of the Fermi scale per se as well as of the origin of mass of the intermediate
vector boson responsible, for example, for the slow burning of our Sun. These theories are
useful for constructing models able to generate the Fermi scale dynamically while passing the
LEP precision measurements. Our extensions, termed Minimal Walking Technicolor, are currently
being studied for potential discovery at the LHC. These theories require new strong dynamics
very different from the strong nuclear force QCD.
Natural Fourth Families
Imagine to discover a new fourth family of leptons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but no
signs of an associated fourth family of quarks. What would that imply? An intriguing possibility
is that the new fermions needed to compensate for the new leptons gauge anomalies simultaneously
address the big hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A natural way to accomplish
such a scenario is to have the Higgs itself be composite of these new fermions.
CP³-Black book 11