Light 't Hooft Top Partners

Vector-like quarks, usually dubbed top partners, are a common presence in composite Higgs models. Being composite objects, their mass is expected to be of the order of their inverse size, that is the condensation scale of the new strong interactions. Light top partners, while not being a generic prediction, are however often considered in phenomenological models. We suggest that their lightness may be due to the matching of global 't Hooft anomalies of the underlying theory. We check this mechanism in explicit models showing that, in one case, composite fermions with the quantum numbers of the top quark obtain a mass which is controlled by a soft breaking term and can be made parametrically small.