LITTLE HIGGS THEORIES

Recently there has been renewed interest in the possibility that the Higgs particle of the Standard Model is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson. This development was spurred by the observation that if certain global symmetries are broken only by the interplay between two or more coupling constants, then the Higgs mass-squared is free from quadratic divergences at one loop. This collective symmetry breaking is the essential ingredient in little Higgs theories, which are weakly coupled extensions of the Standard Model with little or no fine tuning, describing physics up to an energy scale ∼10 TeV. Here we give a pedagogical introduction to little Higgs theories. We review their structure and phenomenology, focusing mainly on the SU(3) theory, the Minimal Moose, and the littlest Higgs as concrete examples.