Aspects of Higgs physics

The Higgs sector is the collection of fields and particles responsible for the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak symmetry. It is the keystone of the Standard Model of particle physics. While the Standard Model Higgs sector is in agreement with current experiments alternative models often arise to explain experimental anomalies, or to answer puzzles about the Higgs model itself. In this dissertation I explore two such alternative models of the Higgs sector. The first is a model of a composite Higgs boson that is designed to be "minimally fine-tuned." I demonstrate how it generates a light Higgs boson with one fine-tuned parameter. The most accessible expected phenomenological signatures of such a model are heavy resonances decaying into weak vector bosons. I compare the predicted behavior of these resonances to recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The second is alternative model attempts to use multiple Higgs to explain a possible 30 GeV resonant excess in dimuon production arising from Z boson decays. I show that the simplest such model cannot explain the excess, and then argue that all such multiple-doublet models also fail