Field Bifurcations and the Challenges of the Higgs Sector

Abstract

The Higgs mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) has several conceptual challenges that are currently unresolved. We recently put forward an alternative embodiment of EWSB based on sequential field bifurcations driven by the Renormalization scale. This brief report points out that the bifurcation scenario can evade three shortcomings of the standard EWSB, related to the gauge hierarchy problem, triviality, and the tachyonic mass term.