Flavor and electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale Original Research Article

We present a unified picture of flavor and electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale. Flavor and Higgs bosons arise as pseudo-Goldstone modes in a nonlinear sigma model. 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 through a Yukawa Lagrangian with a image global flavor symmetry generates well-definite mass textures 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 image for the (lightest) Higgs boson and a characteristic spectrum of new bosons and fermions with masses around the TeV scale.