Vacuum Alignment in "Composite Technicolor" Models

Abstract

We consider the question of vacuum alignment in the recently proposed "composite technicolor" (CTC) models. In order for these models to work, an "ultrafermion" condensate must align in a particular way, driven by the competition between ultrafermion masses and "flavor" gauge boson exchange. We show that for ultrafermion masses large enough to explain the top quark mass, order-of-magnitude estimates are sufficient to establish that the required vacuum alignment cannot occur for perturbative values of the flavor gauge couplings. If the top quark gets its mass from some other mechanism, a detailed calculation is required. Using spectral function sum rules and a vector-meson saturation approximation which is known to work well in QCD, we determine the correct vacuum for this case in a limit where the flavor gauge bosons are weakly coupled and the number of ultracolors $N$ is large. We again find that the vacuum required by CTC models does not occur for perturbative values of the flavor gauge couplings. We conclude that there is no evidence that the vacuum aligns as required in CTC models.