HIDING THE ELECTROWEAK SYMMETRY-BREAKING SECTOR

It is generally assumed that in elastic W and Z scattering either there will be resonances with masses of less than 1 TeV (as expected, for example, in the weakly coupled one-doublet Higgs model) or the scattering amplitudes will be enhanced, indicating the presence of new strong interactions at or above 1 TeV. In this paper we note that there is another possibility: the electroweak symmetry breaking sector may be strongly coupled at low energies because of the presence of large numbers of particles other than the longitudinal components of the W and Z. In this case the elastic W and Z scattering amplitudes may be small without the appearance of any discernible resonances, while the total scattering cross sections are large. In such a model, at no energy is the number of WW or ZZ events large; discovering the electroweak symmetry breaking sector depends on the observation of other particles and our ability to associate them with symmetry breaking. We illustrate this possibility in the context of an O(N) linear sigma model solved in the large-N limit.