Aula Conversi, Roma 1

The recently proposed "clash of symmetries" spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism, applicable to brane-world models, involves Higgs field kink configurations that vary in non-trivial ways as a function of the extra-dimension coordinate w. This allows the symmetry breaking pattern to be a function of w, leading to novel possibilities for model building. Only toy models have so far been analysed. After explaining the general idea, I will survey the existing toys: models with (a) Higgs SU(3) triplets, (b) O(10) adjoint kinks, (c) gauged U(1) x U(1), and (d) global U(1) x U(1) in a Randall-Sundrum-like spacetime