Higgs as a holographic pseudo-Goldstone boson

The AdS/CFT correspondence allows one to relate 4D strongly coupled theories to weakly coupled theories in 5D AdS. We use this correspondence to study a scenario in which the Higgs appears as a composite pseudo-Goldstone boson (PGB) of a strongly coupled theory. We show how a nonlinearly realized global symmetry protects the Higgs mass and guarantees the absence of quadratic divergences at any loop order. The gauge and Yukawa interactions for the PGB Higgs are simple to introduce in the 5D AdS theory, and their one-loop contributions to the Higgs potential are calculated using perturbation theory. These contributions are finite, giving a squared-mass to the Higgs which is one-loop smaller than the mass of the first Kaluza-Klein state. We also show that if the symmetry breaking is caused by boundary conditions in the extra dimension, the PGB Higgs corresponds to the fifth component of the bulk gauge boson. To make the model fully realistic, a tree-level Higgs quartic coupling must be induced. We present a possible mechanism to generate it and discuss the conditions under which an unwanted large Higgs mass term is avoided. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.