2008/07/31 by W. Buchmüller, Wilfried Buchmuller, J. Schmidt +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Heterotic string theory #Higgs boson #Higgs field #Orbifold #Orientifold #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Superpotential #Supersymmetry #Theoretical physics #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2008.09.011
published as Nucl.Phys.B807:265-289,2009 · 29 pages, 1 figure. Final version to appear in Nucl. Phys. B
arxiv created 2008/09/04 · openalex publication_date 2008/09/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In supersymmetric extensions of the standard model there is no basic difference between Higgs and matter fields, which leads to the well known problem of potentially large baryon and lepton number violating interactions. Although these unwanted couplings can be forbidden by continuous or discrete global symmetries, a theoretical guiding principle for their choice is missing. We examine this problem for a class of vacua of the heterotic string compactified on an orbifold. As expected, in general there is no difference between Higgs and matter. However, certain vacua happen to possess unbroken matter parity and discrete R-symmetries which single out Higgs fields in the low energy effective field theory. We present a method how to identify maximal vacua in which the perturbative contribution to the μ-term and the expectation value of the superpotential vanish. Two vacua are studied in detail, one with two pairs of Higgs doublets and one with partial gauge-Higgs unification.