COULD THE SUPERSYMMETRIC HIGGS PARTICLES NATURALLY BE PSEUDO-GOLDSTONE BOSONS

The doublet-triplet splitting problem is perhaps the most problematic aspect of supersymmetric grand unified theories. It can be argued that the most natural reason for the Higgs doublets to be light is that they are pseudo-Goldstone bosons associated with the spontaneous breakdown of an accidental global symmetry. In this paper we discuss the possibility of implementing this idea in the SU(6) model of Refs. [11-14]. We show that although it is simple to generate an accidental symmetry of the renormalizable terms of the potential, it is quite difficult to construct a model which allows for the preservation of the accidental symmetry in the nonrenormalizable terms. We summarize the constraints on such models and then give three different ways to construct a superpotential where the dangerous mixing terms are sufficiently suppressed even in the presence of nonrenormalizable operators. With these examples we demonstrate the existence of consistent models implementing the Higgs as pseudo-Goldstone boson scheme. We extend one of the three examples to include fermion masses. We also show that when restricted to regular group embeddings the only possible models without light triplets are trivial generalizations of the SU(6) model we consider.