Electroweak Symmetry Breaking, New Quarks, and Graphics Processors

Electroweak symmetry breaking is one of the greatest puzzles in particle physics today. In the Standard Model, the solution is the Higgs mechanism, which introduces the greatly sought but as yet undiscovered Higgs boson as a fundamental scalar which leads to new problems. An interesting alternative, known as Extended Technicolor, exists that claims the Higgs is instead composed of “quarks” of a new gauge theory at a higher energy scale. In fact, the Higgs is expected to be discovered in the near future at the Large Hadron Collider, and if the particle’s mass is on or above a certain, not unreasonable scale, then a form of Technicolor may become a prime candidate to explain electroweak symmetry breaking. We are exploring a large class of Technicolor models non-perturbatively, using lattice methods including a CUDA implementation of the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm.