Christopher T. Hill (born June 19, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist, formerly of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who did undergraduate work in physics at M.I.T.

Hill is an originator, with William A. Bardeen and Manfred Lindner, of the idea that the Higgs boson is composed of top and anti-top quarks.

This implies that the top quarks may be strongly coupled at very short distances and could form a composite Higgs boson, which led to top quark condensates,[4] topcolor,[5][6] and dimensional deconstruction, a renormalizable lattice description of extra dimensions of space.

[7] The original minimal top condensation model predicted the Higgs boson mass to be about twice the observed value of 125 GeV, but extensions of the theory achieve concordance with both the Higgs boson and top quark masses.

Several new heavy Higgs bosons, such as a b-quark scalar bound state, may be accessible to the LHC.

[8] [9] [10] Hill coauthored (with Elizabeth H. Simmons) a comprehensive review of strong dynamical theories and electroweak symmetry breaking that has shaped many of the experimental searches for new physics at the Tevatron and LHC.

Hill is a contributor to the theory of topological interactions and, with collaborators, was first to obtain the full Wess-Zumino-Witten term for the standard model which describes the physics of the chiral anomaly in Lagrangians, including pseudoscalars, spin-1 vector mesons, and the

is a heavy nucleus, and may contribute to excess photons seen in low energy neutrino experiments.

[14] The result reproduces B+L violation by the anomaly in the standard model, and predicts numerous other anomalous processes.

Hill has given a derivation of the coefficients of consistent and covariant chiral anomalies (even D), and Chern-Simons terms (odd D), without resorting to fermion loops, from the Dirac monopole construction and its generalization ("Dirac Branes") to higher dimensions.

[16] [17] and developed modern theories of the origin of ultra-high-energy nucleons and neutrinos from grand unification relics.

[18] [19][20][21] He has shown that a cosmic axion field will induce an effective oscillating electric dipole moment for any magnet.

[22][23] In an unpublished talk at the Vancouver Workshop on Quantum Cosmology (May, 1990), Hill discussed possible roles for Nambu-Goldstone bosons in cosmology and suggested that a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson might provide a "natural inflaton," the particle responsible for cosmic inflation.

The idea seemed ad hoc, however subsequent work on Weyl invariant theories offered a better rationale for a natural inflation scenario connected to Planck scale physics.

The Weyl symmetry breaking occurs because the Noether current is the derivative of a scalar operator, called the "kernal."

During a period of pre-Planckian expansion any conserved current must red-shift to zero, hence the kernal approaches a constant value which determines the Planck mass and the Einstein-Hilbert action of General Relativity is emergent.

[24] [25][26] Hill has returned to the issue of composite scalars in relativistic field theory, developing a novel analytic approach to bound states of chiral fermions by generalizing the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model to non-pointlike interactions.

[27][28] He feels the most important challenge to the CERN LHC program is to determine if the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson is a pointlike fundamental particle or a composite bound state near the TeV energy scale.

Hill has authored three popular books with Nobel laureate Leon Lederman about physics and cosmology, and the commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider.