I will review the standard conformal window picture and explore the possibility that the chirally broken phase (QCD) is amenable to an (non-perturbative) infrared fixed point interpretation. I will show that these assumptions lead to a consistent picture and comment on N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories. In a second part I will further speculate on the presence of a dilaton, and outline some of its attractive features.
1) compatibility of conformality with hadron masses
2) a solution to the Goldstone improvement problem
3) investigate the dilaton candidate of QCD, the sigma/f0(500) meson
At last I will give an outlook of how the Higgs can be interpreted as a dilaton in this context and what the open problems are.