The Higgs as a Supersymmetric Nambu-Goldstone Boson

This thesis deals with the idea that the Higgs scalar doublet of the Standard Model is a Goldstone boson arising from a spontaneous breaking of an approximate global symmetry, driven by new physics effects, otherwise unobserved. This would regulate the behavior of the Higgs potential with the aim of addressing the Standard Model hierarchy problem, limiting the validity of the Standard Model as an effective theory to processes at ener- gies below a cutoff around the TeV scale. After introducing this paradigm, also reviewing some literature, we describe few explicit models, minimal in some sense, built in the context of supersymmetric field theories. We show the details of the constructions, in particular its novel properties given by the presence of supersymmetry. We take into account the most important experimental constraints and we argue that some versions of these theories can be soon tested at collider experiments.