Softened Goldstone Breaking

A new way of breaking the Goldstone symmetry in composite Higgs models is discussed, restoring the global symmetry in the mixings between the elementary and composite fermions by completing the former to full representations. The Goldstone symmetry is in turn broken softly by vector-like mass terms in the elementary sector only. The resulting softened explicit breaking allows for a light Higgs boson and a heavy top quark, without the need of ultra-light top partners around the Goldstone scale. Finally, the inclusion of an enlarged global symmetry ('maximal symmetry') to reduce the tuning is explored.