Higher mass scales and mass hierarchies

The impact of new interactions at very high energies on the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in gauge field theories is studied. Described at low energies by higher dimension operators, these interactions can enhance the chiral condensate and even the Goldstone boson decay constant relative to the confinement scale. This can lead to important consequences in technicolor theories, including realistically large quark and lepton masses and the possibility of new physics at energies below the weak scale. In addition, small differences in strength of the four-fermion interactions, due say to isospin or flavor breaking, can be greatly magnified in the resulting quark and lepton mass spectrum.