Unification of flavor, CP, and modular symmetries

Baur, Alexander; Nilles, Hans Peter; Trautner, Andreas and Vaudrevange, Patrick K. S. (2019): Unification of flavor, CP, and modular symmetries. In: Physics Letters B, Vol. 795: pp. 7-14

Abstract

Flavor symmetry plays a crucial role in the standard model of particle physics but its origin is still unknown. We develop a new method (based on outer automorphisms of the Narain space group) to determine flavor symmetries within compactified string theory. A picture emerges where traditional (discrete) flavor symmetries, CP-like symmetries and modular symmetries (like T-duality) of string theory combine to unified flavor symmetries. The groups depend on the geometry of compact space and the geographical location of fields in the extra dimensions. We observe a phenomenon of "local flavor groups" with potentially different flavor symmetries for the various sectors of quarks and leptons. This should allow interesting connections to existing bottom-up attempts in flavor model building. (C) 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• ISSN: 0370-2693
• Language: English