Radiative Symmetry Breaking on D-branes at Non-supersymmetric Singularities

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for radiative gauge symmetry breaking on D3-branes at non-supersymmetric orbifold singularities, demonstrating a stable string theory background with realistic particle spectra and radiative electroweak symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of a non-supersymmetric D-brane model showing stable singularity backgrounds and explicit calculation of radiative corrections leading to electroweak symmetry breaking.

Findings

No tachyon modes in twisted sectors

Stable background with canceled twisted sector tadpoles

Negative Higgs mass squared from one-loop corrections

Abstract

The possibility of radiative gauge symmetry breaking on D3-branes at non-supersymmetric orbifold singularities is examined. As an example, a simple model of D3-branes at non-supersymmetric C^3/Z_6 singularity with some D7-branes for the cancellations of R-R tadpoles in twisted sectors is analyzed in detail. We find that there are no tachyon modes in twisted sectors, and NS-NS tadpoles in twisted sectors are canceled out, though uncanceled tadpoles and tachyon modes exist in untwisted sectors. This means that this singularity background is a stable solution of string theory at tree level, though some specific compactification of six-dimensional space should be considered for a consistent untwisted sector. On D3-brane three massless "Higgs doublet fields" and three family "up-type quarks" are realized at tree level. Other fermion fields, "down-type quarks" and "leptons", can be realized as massless modes of the open strings stretching between D3-branes and D7-branes. The Higgs doublet fields have Yukawa couplings with up-type quarks, and they also have self-couplings which give a scalar potential without flat directions. Since there is no supersymmetry, the radiative corrections may naturally develop negative Higgs mass squared and "electroweak symmetry breaking". We explicitly calculate the open string one-loop correction to the Higgs mass squared from twisted sectors, and find that the negative value is indeed realized in this specific model.