The intermediate Higgs

Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weaklycoupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. Theformer suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations toradiative corrections, while the latter presents potential discrepancies withprecision electroweak physics. Here we present a framework for electroweaksymmetry breaking which interpolates between these two paradigms, and mitigatestheir faults. As in Little Higgs theories, the Higgs is a pseudo-NambuGoldstone boson, potentially composite. The cutoff sensitivity of the one looptop quark contribution to the effective potential is canceled by contributionsfrom additional vector-like quarks, and the cutoff can naturally be higher thanin the minimal Standard Model. Unlike the Little Higgs models, the cutoffsensitivity from one loop gauge contributions is not canceled. However, suchgauge contributions are naturally small as long as the cutoff is below 6 TeV.Precision electroweak corrections are suppressed relative to those ofTechnicolor or generic Little Higgs theories. In some versions of theintermediate scenario, the Higgs mass is computable in terms of the masses ofthese additional fermions and the Nambu-Goldstone Boson decay constant. Inaddition to the Higgs, new scalar and pseudoscalar particles are typicallypresent at the weak scale