Lectures on walking technicolor, holography and gauge/gravity dualities

Understand

Dynamical electro-weak symmetry breaking is an appealing, strongly-coupled alternative to the weakly-coupled models based on an elementary scalar field developing a vacuum expectation value.

• In the first two sections of this set of lectures, I summarize the arguments, based on low-energy phenomenology, supporting walking technicolor as a realistic realization of this idea.
• This pedagogical introduction to walking technicolor, and more generally to the physics of extensions of the standard model, makes extensive use of effective field theory arguments, symmetries and counting rules.
• The strongly-coupled nature of the underlying interactions, and the peculiar quasi-conformal behavior of the theory, require to use non-perturbative methods in order to address many fundamental questions within this framework.