A pedagogical review of electroweak symmetry breaking scenarios

Abstract

We review different avenues of electroweak symmetry breaking explored over the years. This constitutes a timely exercise as the world's largest and the highest energy particle accelerator, namely, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, has started running whose primary mission is to find the Higgs or some phenomena that mimic the effects of the Higgs, i.e. to unravel the mysteries of electroweak phase transition. In the beginning, we discuss the Standard Model Higgs mechanism. After that we review the Higgs sector of the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model. Then we take up three relatively recent ideas: little Higgs, gauge-Higgs unification and Higgsless scenarios. For the latter three cases, we first present the basic ideas and restrict our illustration to some instructive toy models to provide an intuitive feel of the underlying dynamics, and then discuss, for each of the three cases, how more realistic scenarios are constructed and how to decipher their experimental signatures. Wherever possible, we provide pedagogical details, which beginners might find useful.