Progress on 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. I briefly review the basics of topcolor-assisted technicolor, including major constraints and a general approach to satisfying them. The main challenge to topcolor-assisted technicolor 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.