Theoretical Physics Colloquium

Walking Technicolor & AdS/CFT

by Dr Daniel Elander (TIFR)

Asia/Kolkata
AG69 (Colaba Campus)

AG69

Colaba Campus

Description
The question of why electroweak symmetry is broken is perhaps the most urgent one in high energy physics today. One possibility is that the breaking occurs due to strongly coupled dynamics, i.e. what is referred to as Technicolor models. In the first part of this talk, we review such models, and the phenomenological constraints they have to satisfy, focusing in particular on so-called Walking Technicolor. In the second part of the talk, we discuss how to use string-theoretic methods to compute observables, such as the precision electroweak parameters, at strong coupling. One especially interesting question is whether the spectrum contains a light scalar, the dilaton, pseudo-Goldstone boson of dilatations, present due to the spontaneous breaking of approximate scale invariance that characterizes Walking Technicolor models. At low energies, such a dilaton would be difficult to distinguish from the Higgs.
Slides