Symmetry breaking and scalar bosons

There are reasons to suspect that the spontaneous breakdown of the gauge symmetries of the observed weak and electromagnetic interactions may be produced by the vacuum expectation values of massless weakly coupled elementary scalar fields. A method is described for finding the broken-symmetry solutions of such theories even when they contain arbitrary numbers of scalar fields with unconstrained couplings. In any such theory, there should exist a number of heavy Higgs bosons, with masses comparable to the intermediate vector bosons, plus one light Higgs boson, or "scalon" with mass of order $\alpha {G_F}^{-\frac{1}{2}}$. The mass and couplings of the scalon are calculable in terms of other masses, even without knowing all the details of the theory. For an SU(2) ⊗ U(1) model with arbitrary numbers of scalar isodoublets, the scalon mass is greater than 5.26 GeV; a likely value is 7-10 GeV. The production and decay of the scalon are briefly considered. Some comments are offered on the relation between the mass scales associated with the weak and strong interactions.