Condensate Enhancement and D-Meson Mixing in Technicolor Theories

Abstract

Since the pioneering work of Eichten and Lane it has been known that the scale of the interactions responsible for the generation of the strange-quark mass in extended technicolor theories must, absent any "GIM-like" mechanism for suppressing flavor-changing neutral currents, be greater than of order 1000 TeV. In this note we point out that the constraint from the neutral D-meson system is now equally strong, implying that the charm quark mass must also arise from flavor dynamics at a scale this high. We then quantify the degree to which the technicolor condensate must be enhanced in order to yield the observed quark masses, if the extended technicolor scale is of order 1000 TeV. Our results are intended to provide a framework in which to interpret and apply the results of lattice studies of conformal strongly interacting gauge theories, and the corresponding numerical measurements of the anomalous dimension of the mass operator in candidate theories of "walking" technicolor.