We consider a technicolor model in which the expectation value of an additional, possibly composite, scalar field is responsible for the generation of fermion masses. We define the dynamics of the strongly coupled sector by constructing its holographic dual. Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study the S parameter and the phenomenology of the light technihadrons. We find that the S parameter is small over a significant region of the model's parameter space. The particle spectrum is distinctive and includes a nonstandard Higgs boson as well as heavier hadronic resonances. Technihadron masses and decay rates are calculated holographically, as a function of the model's parameters.

We calculate the running of the quark mass and the quark condensate using a dynamical soft-wall model by Csaki and Reece. We show that a correct running can be obtained with an appropriate sign for the dilaton field. In the soft-wall model with quadratic dilaton profile, a wrong sign for the dilaton field can give rise to a massless vector meson, a signature of spontaneously broken symmetry in the vector sector, which is not observed in nature. With a right parameter range, we obtain no such massless vector meson. We also find that, contrary to the soft-wall model with quadratic dilaton profile, the model allows a non-vanishing quark condensate in the chiral limit. We obtain the vector meson mass spectrum similar to that of the hard-wall model. By varying a parameter in the model we can fit the running of the quark mass and of the quark condensate.

We find a class of four dimensional deformed conformal field theories which appear extra dimensional when their gauge symmetries are spontaneously broken. The theories are supersymmetric moose models which flow to interacting conformal fixed points at low energies, deformed by superpotentials. Using a-maximization we give strong nonperturbative evidence that the hopping terms in the resulting latticized action are relevant deformations of the fixed point theories. These theories have an intricate structure of RG flows between conformal fixed points. Our results suggest that at the stable fixed points each of the bulk gauge couplings and superpotential hopping terms is turned on, in favor of the extra dimensional interpretation of the theory. However, we argue that the higher dimensional gauge coupling is generically small compared to the size of the extra dimension. In the presence of a brane the topology of the extra dimension is determined dynamically and depends on the numbers of colors and bulk and brane flavors, which suggests phenomenological applications. The RG flows between fixed points in these theories provide a class of tests of Cardy's conjectured a-theorem.