2020/12/15 by Renato M. Fonseca, Fonseca, Renato M.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.08410
Contribution to the proceedings of the 40th International Conference on High Energy physics (ICHEP2020), 28 July -- 6 August 2020, Prague, Czech Republic (virtual meeting)
arxiv created 2020/12/15 · arxiv updated 2020/12/16
We do not know why there are three fermion families in the Standard Model (SM), nor can we explain the observed pattern of fermion masses and mixing angles. Standard grand unified theories based on the SU(5) and SO(10) groups fail to shed light on this issue, since they also contain three copies of fermion representations of an enlarged gauge group. However, it does not need to be so: the Standard Model families might be distributed over distinct representations of a grand unified model, in which case the gauge symmetry itself might discriminate the various families and explain (at least partially) the flavor puzzle. The most ambitious version of this idea consists on embedding all SM fermions in a single irreducible representation of the gauge group.