Grand unified supersymmetric Higgs bosons as pseudo-Goldstone particles

We reconsider the possibility that the Higgs doublet responsible for the breaking of the electroweak gauge group be quasi-Goldstone bosons of a spontaneously broken approximate global symmetry of the theory. Supersymmetric SU(5) and SO(10) gauge models are discussed. The main phenomenological consequence of this viewpoint is the possible existence at the Fermi scale of a quasi-stable particle, most likely a Lorentz scalar, with the same colour and charge as a down quark. Its existence is a generic feature of models based on SO(10). The associated phenomenological is illustrated. We also show how the phenomenology of the minimal SU(5) theory, already proposed, gets tightly constrained by the consideration of coupling constant unification without any assumption, otherwise crucial, on the superheavy threshold effects.