CP violation and vacuum alignment in technicolor theories

In this work we show that the violation of the combined symmetry of charge conjugation and parity (CP) can be understood in technicolor theories that aim at an explanation of the dynamics of breaking of electroweak symmetries and mass generation for matter. The mechanism we use is vacuum alignment. Vacuum alignment can be understood as the lifting by a perturbation of the vacuum state degeneracy of a theory which admits a spontaneously broken global symmetry. Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs when the ground state of a theory does not have the full symmetry of the hamiltonian. In such a theory, one defines the CP operator with respect to a standard vacuum which is chosen from among the degenerate ones in the absence of the perturbation. Since, in the presence of a perturbation, vacuum alignment determines which of the degenerate vacua (not necessarily the standard choice) will yield the smallest vacuum energy, this mechanism can alter the CP structure of a theory.;CP violation in the standard model of particle physics occurs in two different ways. One stems from the rich vacuum structure of the theory of quark interactions; this form is called strong CP violation. The other is due to the presence of a complex number in the standard model Lagrangian; this form is called weak CP violation. In nature only the weak form has been observed. The absence of strong CP violation presents a challenge because theoretically one expects this effect to be large.;We show that both the absence of strong CP violation and the presence of weak CP violation can be explained via vacuum alignment within the context of technicolor theories without arbitrary fine tuning of the parameters.;We also show that one popular variant of technicolor theories, known as topcolor assisted technicolor (proposed to explain the fact that the top quark is very much heavier than the other quarks) is strongly constrained by experimental data on mixing effects of neutral B-mesons.