Quartification On An Orbifold
arXiv:hep-ph/0610346 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.75.056006
Abstract
We investigate quartification models in five dimensions, with the fifth dimension forming an orbifold. The orbifold construction is combined with a boundary Higgs sector to break the quartified gauge group directly to a group which is operative at the electroweak scale. We consider and , where is the standard model gauge group, and find that unification occurs only when the remnant leptonic colour symmetry remains unbroken. Furthermore, the demands of a realistic low energy fermion spectrum specify a unique symmetry breaking route for the unifying case of . We contrast this with four dimensional quartification models where unification may be achieved via a number of different symmetry breaking routes both with and without the remnant symmetry. The boundary Higgs sector of our model may be decoupled to achieve a Higgsless limit and we show that the electroweak Higgs doublet may be identified as the fifth component of a higher dimensional gauge field.
14 pages, misprint corrected, matches PRD version