Understanding the genesis of mass: a mystery pointing towards the mirror world

Abstract

We give a pedagogical and concise presentation of dynamical mass generation involving strongly-interacting mirror fermions. As a paradigm which has been explicitly shown to predict correctly the weak scale and the weak angle and thus addressing successfully the essence of the hierarchy problem of energy scales (contrary to "supersymmetric" or "extra-dimension" models) and the unification of fundamental forces, it might have already manifested indirectly its validity experimentally, as first noted by the author in 1998, via the bottom-quark forward-backward asymmetry and the related coupling parameter A_b. After a decade during which the particle-physics community was frequently misled by a particularly obscurantist interpretation of the L.E.P./S.L.C. precision data, this approach emerges as a strong candidate for new physics beyond the standard model of elementary particles to be thoroughly tested in the forthcoming high-energy experiments.