The Significance of the Heavy Top Quark

Experiment shows that the top quark is far heavier than the other elementary fermions. This finding has stimulated research on theories of electroweak and flavor symmetry breaking that include physics beyond the standard model. Efforts to accommodate a heavy top quark within existing frameworks have revealed constraints on model-building. Other investigations have started from the premise that a large top quark mass could signal a qualitative difference between the top quark and other fermions, perhaps in the form of new interactions peculiar to the top quark. Such new dynamics may also help answer existing questions about electroweak and flavor physics. This talk explores the implications of the heavy top quark in the context of weakly-coupled (e.g. SUSY) and strongly-coupled (e.g. technicolor) theories of electroweak symmetry breaking.