HIGGS TRIPLETS IN THE STANDARD MODEL

Even though the standard model of the strong and electroweak interactions has proven enormously successful, it need not be the case that a single Higgs-doublet field is responsible for giving masses to the weakly interacting vector bosons and the fermions. In this paper we explore the phenomenology of a Higgs sector for the standard model which contains both doublet and triplet fields [under SU(2)L]. The resulting Higgs bosons have many exotic features and surprising experimental signatures. Since a critical task of future accelerators will be to either discover or establish the nonexistence of Higgs bosons with mass below the TeV scale, it will be important to keep in mind the alternative possibilities characteristic of this and other nonminimal Higgs sectors. © 1990 The American Physical Society.