New approaches to electroweak symmetry breaking

Although the spectacular experimental achievements of particle physics in the last decade have strengthened the Standard Model (SM) as an adequate description of nature, they have also revealed that the SM matter гергеsents а mere 5% or so of the energy density of the Universe, which clearly points to some physics beyond the SM despite the desperate lack of direct experimental evidence. The sector responsible for the spontaneous breaking of the SM electroweak symmetry is likely to be the first to provide experimental hints at this new physics. The aim of this review is, after briefly introducing SM physics and the conventional Higgs mechanism, to give а survey of recent ideas on how the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking can be explained.