ALTERNATIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE HIGGS BOSON

We discuss an alternative implementation of the Higgs boson within the Standard Model which is possible if the renormalizability condition is relaxed. Namely, at energy scale Lambda the Higgs boson interacts at tree-level only with matter fermions, while the full gauge invariance is still maintained. The interactions with the electroweak gauge bosons are induced at low energies through the radiative corrections. In this scenario the Higgs boson can be arbitrarily heavy, interacting with the Standard Model fields arbitrarily weakly. No violation of unitarity in the scattering of longitudinal electroweak bosons occurs, since they become unphysical degrees of freedom at energies Lambda similar to TeV.