Radiative Electroweak Symmetry Breaking Beyond Leading Logarithms

The top-quark Yukawa coupling is too large to permit radiative electroweak symmetry breaking to occur for small values of y, the Higgs self-coupling, to leading-logarithm order. However, a large y solution leading to a viable Higgs mass of approximately 220 GeV does exist, and differs from conventional symmetry breaking by an approximately five-fold enhancement of the Higgs self-coupling. This scenario for radiative symmetry breaking is reviewed, and the order-by-order perturbative stability of this scenario is studied within the scalar field theory projection of the standard model in which the Higgs self-coupling y represents the dominant standard-model coupling.