Top Quark Mass in Exophobic Pati--Salam Heterotic String Model

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a specific heterotic string model with Pati-Salam symmetry, focusing on its implications for the top quark mass and the viability of fermion mass generation within the model's constraints.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a viable string-derived model with realistic fermion mass structures and identifies conditions for top quark mass generation in such models.

Findings

A leading order top quark mass term exists only for one family.

The model contains supersymmetric flat directions that give heavy masses to unwanted states.

Below the Pati-Salam scale, the model reduces to the MSSM spectrum.

Abstract

We analyse the phenomenology of an exemplary exophobic Pati-Salam heterotic string vacuum, in which no exotic fractionally charged states exist in the massless string spectrum. Our model also contains the Higgs representations that are needed to break the gauge symmetry to that of the Standard Model and to generate fermion masses at the electroweak scale. We show that the requirement of a leading mass term for the heavy generation, which is not degenerate with the mass terms of the lighter generations, places an additional strong constraint on the viability of the models. In many models a top quark Yukawa may not exist at all, whereas in others two or more generations may obtain a mass term at leading order. In our exemplary model a mass term at leading order exist only for one family. Additionally, we demonstrate the existence of supersymmetric F- and D-flat directions that give heavy mass to all the colour triplets beyond those of the Standard Model and leave one pair of electroweak Higgs doublets light. Hence, below the Pati-Salam breaking scale, the matter states in our model that are charged under the observable gauge symmetries, consist solely of those of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.