Technicolor with a Massless Scalar Doublet

Abstract

We consider a minimal technicolor model in which the ordinary and technicolor sectors are coupled by a {\it massless} scalar doublet. When technicolor interactions become strong, the resulting technicolor condensate not only breaks the electroweak symmetry, but also causes the scalar to develop a vacuum expectation value. With the appropriate choice of the scalar's Yukawa couplings, fermion masses are generated, giving us the conventional pattern of flavor symmetry breaking. Although no explicit scalar mass term appears in the full lagrangian of the model, the pseudoscalar states that remain in the low-energy effective theory gain sufficient mass through technicolor interactions to evade detection. We show that this model does not generate unacceptably large flavor changing neutral currents, and is consistent with the experimental constraints on oblique electroweak radiative corrections. We determine the experimentally allowed region of the model's parameter space, and discuss the significance of a phenomenologically viable model that has no arbitrary dimensionful parameters. In terms of parameter counting, our model is the simplest possible extension of the standard model.