ABSTRACT
A major goal of the particle physics program at the high-energy frontier, recently pursued at the Fermilab Tevatron collider and now taken up by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is to unravel the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. While the existence of the massive electroweak gauge bosons (W±, Z), together with the successful description of their behavior by non-abelian gauge theory, requires some form of electroweak symmetry breaking to be present in nature, the underlying dynamics is not known yet. An appealing theoretical suggestion for such dynamics is the Higgs mechanism [1], which implies the existence of one or more Higgs bosons (depending on the specific model considered). Therefore, the search for Higgs bosons is a major cornerstone in the physics programs of past, present and future high-energy colliders.
