Probing technicolor theories with staggered fermions

One exciting possibility of new physics beyond the Standard Model is that the fundamental Higgs sector is replaced by a strongly-interacting gauge theory, known as technicolor. A viable theory must break chiral symmetry dynamically, like in QCD, to generate Goldstone bosons which become the longitudinal components of the W^± and Z. By measuring the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator, one can determine if chiral symmetry is in fact spontaneously broken. We simulate SU(3) gauge theory with n_s = 2 and 3 staggered flavors in the fundamental representation, corresponding to N_f = 8 and 12 flavors in the continuum limit. Although our first findings show that both theories are consistent with dynamically broken chiral symmetry and QCD-like behavior, flavor breaking effects in the spectrum may require further clarifications before final conclusions can be drawn. We also compare various improved staggered actions, to suppress this potentially large flavor breaking.