Scherk-Schwarz Breaking and Intersecting Branes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Scherk-Schwarz deformations influence intersecting brane models, showing they can give mass to non-chiral fermions, potentially resolving a key issue in modeling the Standard Model.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Scherk-Schwarz deformations can generate tree-level masses for non-chiral fermions in intersecting brane setups, addressing a major challenge in string phenomenology.

Findings

Non-chiral fermions acquire mass dependent on compactification parameters.

Scherk-Schwarz deformations provide a natural mass generation mechanism.

Potential resolution to the massless fermion problem in brane-world models.

Abstract

We study the effect of Scherk-Schwarz deformations on intersecting branes. Non-chiral fermions in any representation of the Chan-Paton gauge group generically acquire a tree-level mass dependent on the compactification radius and the brane wrapping numbers. This offers an elegant solution to one of the long-standing problems in intersecting-brane-world models where the ubiquitous presence of massless non-chiral fermions is a clear embarrassment for any attempt to describe the Standard Model of Particle Physics.