This talk reviews recent progress in Higgsless models of electroweak symmetry breaking, and summarizes relevant points of model-building and phenomenology.
We study elastic pion-pion scattering in global linear moose models and apply the results to a variety of Higgsless models in flat and AdS space using the Equivalence Theorem. In order to connect the global moose to Higgsless models, we first introduce a block-spin transformation which corresponds, in the continuum, to the freedom to perform coordinate transformations in the Higgsless model. We show that it is possible to make an f-flat deconstruction in which all of the f-constants f_j of the linear moose model are identical; the phenomenologically relevant f-flat models are those in which the coupling constants of the groups at either end of the moose are small - corresponding to the global linear moose. In studying pion-pion scattering, we derive various sum rules, including one analogous to the KSRF relation, and use them in evaluating the low-energy and high-energy forms of the leading elastic partial wave scattering amplitudes. We obtain elastic unitarity bounds as a function of the mass of the lightest KK mode and discuss their physical significance.
In this talk, using deconstruction, we analyze the form of the corrections to the electroweak interactions in a large class of ``Higgsless models of electroweak symmetry breaking, allowing for arbitrary 5-D geometry, position-dependent gauge coupling, and brane kinetic energy terms. Many models considered in the literature, including those most likely to be phenomenologically viable, are in this class. By analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the correlation function of gauge currents at high momentum, we extract the exact form of the relevant correlation functions at tree-level and compute the corrections to precision electroweak observables in terms of the spectrum of heavy vector bosons. We determine when nonoblique corrections due to the interactions of fermions with the heavy vector bosons become important, and specify the form such interactions can take. In particular we find that in this class of models, so long as the theory remains unitary, S - 4 c^2_W T > O(1), where S and T are the usual oblique parameters.
In this note we examine the properties of deconstructed Higgsless models for the case of a fermion whose SU(2) properties arise from delocalization over many sites of the deconstructed lattice. We derive expressions for the correlation functions and use these to establish a generalized consistency relation among correlation functions. We discuss the form of the W boson wavefunction and show that if the probability distribution of the delocalized fermions is appropriately related to the W wavefunction, then deviations in precision electroweak parameters are minimized. In particular, we show that this ideal fermion delocalization results in the vanishing of three of the four leading zero-momentum electroweak parameters defined by Barbieri, et. al. We then discuss ideal fermion delocalization in the context of two continuum Higgsless models, one in Anti-deSitter space and one in flat space. Our results may be applied to any Higgsless linear moose model with multiple SU(2) groups, including those with only a few extra vector bosons.
The structure of the 1/Nc expansion for the baryon distribution amplitude in QCD is tested using quark models. Earlier conjectures about this structure based on the evolution equation and on the soft-pion theorem are confirmed by the model analysis. The problem of the calculation of the baryon wave function at large Nc is reduced to the analysis of equations of motion for an effective classical dynamical system.
We study the potential of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to probe the spin of new massive vector boson resonances predicted by Higgsless models. We consider its production via weak boson fusion which relies only on the coupling between the new resonances and the weak gauge bosons. We show that the LHC will be able to unravel the spin of the particles associated with the partial restoration of unitarity in vector boson scattering for integrated luminosities of 150-560 fb^-1, depending on the new state mass and on the method used in the analyses.