Beyond the Standard Model: A Noncommutative Approach

During the last two decades Alain Connes developed Noncommutative Geometry (NCG), which allows to unify two of the basic theories of modern physics: General Relativity (GR) and the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics as classical field theories. In the noncommutative framework the Higgs boson, which had previously to be put in by hand, and many of the ad hoc features of the standard model appear in a natural way. The aim of this presentation is to motivate this unification from basic physical principles and to give a flavour of its derivation. One basic prediction of the noncommutative approach to the SM is that the mass of the Higgs Boson should be of the order of 170 GeV if one assumes the Big Desert. This mass range is with reasonable probability excluded by the Tevatron and therefore it is interesting to investigate models beyond the SM that are compatible with NCG. Going beyond the SM is highly non-trivial within the NCG approach but possible extensions have been found and provide for phenomenologically interesting models. We will present in this article a short introduction into the NCG framework and describe one of these extensions of the SM. This model contains new scalar bosons (and fermions) which constitute a second Higgs-like sector mixing with theordinary Higgs sector and thus considerably modifying the mass eigenvalues.
Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of the XLIVth Rencontres de Moriond: Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories (La Thuile, Italy, 7-14 March 2009)