Dynamics of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking * in the Weinberg Salam Theory

We argue that the existence of fundamental scalar fields constitutes a serious flaw of the Weinberg Salam theory. A possible scheme without such fields is described. The symmetry breaking is induced by a new strongly interacting sector whose natural scale is of the order of a few TeV. (Submitted to Phys. Rev.) -t Permanent address after Sept. 1, 1978, Dept. of Physics, Stanford University. *Work supported by the Department of Energy under contract number EY-76-C-03-0515. -21. WHY NOT FUNDAMENTAL SCALARS? The need for fundamental scalar fields in the theory of weak and electromagnetic forces 1 is a serious flaw. Aside from the subjective esthetic argument, there exists a real difficulty connected with the quadratic mass divergences which,always accompany scalar fields.2 These divergences violate a concept of naturalness which requires the observable properties of a theory to be stable against minute variations of the fundamental parameters. The basic underlying framework of discussion of naturalness assumes the existence of a fundamental length scale, K -1 , which serves as a real cutoff. Many authors3 have speculated that K should be of order 10 19 GeV corresponding to the Plank gravitational length. The basic parameters of such a theory are some set of dimensionless bare couplings go and masses. The dimensionless bare masses are defined as the ratio of bare mass to . cutoff