Nonperturbative contribution to the fermion propagator and dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking

Abstract

We examine the field-theoretical contribution of fermion-antifermion condensates arising from a weak-SU(2) doublet of condensing fermions to electroweak vacuum polarization functions. For the custodial-SU(2) case of equal condensates and masses, we find that the condensate contributions to vacuum polarization functions uphold the electroweak signature relationm _w=m _zcosθ_w, and that these contributions are decoupled entirely from oblique radiative corrections. If only the upper member of the doublet forms a fermion-antifermion condensate, the relationm _w=m _zcosθ_w is again upheld in the limit that the mass of the lower member of the doublet is small compared to that of the upper member. For this case, the upper-member's fermion-antifermion condensate is shown to enter oblique radiative corrections. In the absense of an explicit Higgs mechanism, identification of this doublet with (t, b) is shown to be excluded by present empirical bounds onS, T, andU parameters. Further phenomenological consequences of fermion-antifermion condensate contributions to theW-Z mass matrix are discussed, both in the absense and in the presence of an explicit Higgs mechanism.