Symmetry Breaking and Generational Mixing in Topcolor--Assisted Technicolor

Abstract

Topcolor--assisted technicolor provides a dynamical explanation for electroweak and flavor symmetry breaking and for the large mass of the top quark without unnatural fine tuning. A major challenge is to generate the observed mixing between heavy and light generations while breaking the strong topcolor interactions near~$1\,\tev$. I argue that these phenomena, as well as electroweak symmetry breaking, are intimately connected and I present a scenario for them based on nontrivial patterns of technifermion condensation. I also exhibit a class of models realizing this scenario. This picture leads to a rich phenomenology, especially in hadron and lepton collider experiments in the few hundred GeV to few TeV region and in precision electroweak tests at the $Z^0$, atomic parity violation, and polarized Møller scattering.