Theory HEP Seminar

Elementary Goldstone Higgs and Dark Matter

Alanne Tommi

University of Jyvaskyla

We have studied an extension of the scalar sector of the Standard Model where the global symmetry breaking pattern is SU(4) → Sp(4). This is interesting, because depending on the embedding of the electroweak sector, the spontaneous breaking of the global symmetry can break the electroweak symmetry completely or alternatively leave it intact. In the latter case, the entire Higgs doublet can be identified with four of the five Goldstone bosons of the global symmetry breaking. We are interested in a unified description of these two different scenarios and let the vacuum, a priori, be a generic linear combination of these two. While for the tree-level potential all the different vacua are equivalent, the electroweak sector determines a preferred vacuum alignment via quantum effects.

In this talk, I will present the results of our study and show that after taking the quantum corrections into account, the Higgs boson is mostly a pseudo-Goldstone state. In addition, the model can facilitate a phenomenologically viable pseudo-Goldstone dark matter candidate.