A heavy Higgs from flavor and electroweak symmetry unification

By Marco Fabbrichesi, INFN/SISSA

We present a unified picture of flavor and electroweaksymmetry breaking based on a nonlinear sigma model spontaneously broken at the TeV scale. Flavor and Higgs bosons arise as pseudoGoldstone modes. Explicit collective symmetry breaking yields stable vacuum expectation values and masses protected at one loop by the little-Higgs mechanism. The coupling to the fermions generates well-definite mass textures—according to a U(1) global flavor symmetry—that correctly reproduce the mass hierarchies and mixings of quarks and leptons. The model is more constrained than usual little-Higgs models because of bounds on weak and flavor physics. The main experimental signatures testable at the LHC are a rather large mass of 317±80 GeV for the (lightest) Higgs boson and a characteristic spectrum of new bosons and fermions at the TeV scale.