On the origin of families of quarks and leptons - predictions for four families

TL;DR

This paper explores a unifying approach to understanding quark and lepton families through a higher-dimensional framework, predicting the existence and properties of a potential fourth family observable at future accelerators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unification scheme in 13+1 dimensions that links internal degrees of freedom to family structure and predicts the properties of a possible fourth family.

Findings

Estimate of fourth family quark masses

Analysis of mixing matrix implications

Potential observability at future accelerators

Abstract

The approach unifying all the internal degrees of freedom--proposed by one of us--is offering a new way of understanding families of quarks and leptons: A part of the starting Lagrange density in d(=1+13), which includes two kinds of spin connection fields--the gauge fields of two types of Clifford algebra objects--transforms the right handed quarks and leptons into the left handed ones manifesting in d=1+3 the Yukawa couplings of the Standard model. We study the influence of the way of breaking symmetries on the Yukawa couplings and estimate properties of the fourth family--the quark masses and the mixing matrix, investigating the possibility that the fourth family of quarks and leptons appears at low enough energies to be observable with the new generation of accelerators.