ElectroWeak Symmetry Breaking as of 2003, on the way to the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

I review the status of the ElectroWeak Symmetry Breaking problem. The lectures are naturally divided into two parts. The first is mostly devoted to overview the impact of current data on the issue of EWSB. The tools are known, the latest data are included. Always in the first part, I say why I care about the "little hierarchy" problem and I summarize how some proposals for EWSB, recent and less recent, are confronted with this problem. Motivated by these considerations, in the second part I describe the essential features of a proposal for breaking supersymmetry, and consequently the electroweak symmetry, by boundary conditions on an extra dimension.