Walking Technicolor & AdS/CFT

The question of why electroweak symmetry is broken is perhaps the most
urgent one in high energy physics today. One possibility is that the
breaking occurs due to strongly coupled dynamics, i.e. what is
referred to as Technicolor models. In the first part of this talk, we
review such models, and the phenomenological constraints they have to
satisfy, focusing in particular on so-called Walking Technicolor. In
the second part of the talk, we discuss how to use string-theoretic
methods to compute observables, such as the precision electroweak
parameters, at strong coupling. One especially interesting question is
whether the spectrum contains a light scalar, the dilaton,
pseudo-Goldstone boson of dilatations, present due to the spontaneous
breaking of approximate scale invariance that characterizes Walking
Technicolor models. At low energies, such a dilaton would be difficult
to distinguish from the Higgs.