Unhiggs

by Adam Falkowski (CERN)

Thursday 20 Nov 2008, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

1/1-025 (CERN)

Part I: discussion of recent papers (15 min max) Part II: chalkboard talk by Adam Falkowski Abstract for talk: Recently Stancato and Terning [0807.3961] showed that the Standard Model Higgs boson can be replaced by a more exotic scalar object with a non-local kinetic term. Unlike ordinary particles, this scalar displays a continuous spectrum of excitations, hence the name unparticle Higgs, or Unhiggs. The Unhiggs can play a similar role as the Standard Model Higgs even though its gauge interactions are very non-standard. In particular, its condensation leads to electroweak symmetry breaking, and its contribution to WW scattering restores unitarity of the longitudinal WW scattering amplitude. In the talk, I will review the Unhiggs scenario and present an alternative holographic formulation [0810.4940], where the non-local action is obtained as a boundary effective action of a local higher dimensional gauge theory. I will also discuss electroweak precision observables and perspectives for collider phenomenology.