Café com Física

Low-scale gauge unification of families and forces

by António Morais (UA)

Portugal
Sala de Conferências (Departamento de Física FCTUC)

Sala de Conferências

Departamento de Física FCTUC

Universidade de Coimbra
Description

In this seminar I will revisit the paradigm of grand unification and present a new model where besides the unification of the three fundamental particle interactions the flavour structure observed in nature also results from a unified description of a gauged family symmetry with the strong and electroweak ones. While in the traditional approach the unification scale, or GUT scale, lies beyond 10^{16} GeV, far above our experimental reach, in our model it is only consistently realized 10 orders of magnitude below while complying with proton decay constraints. The model also features spontaneous supersymmetry breaking close to the GUT scale without needing to invoke the usual, and rather arbitrary, soft-SUSY breaking approach. The smallness of the electroweak scale results from radiative breaking effects and only one light Higgs boson is expected in the model. Last but not least, only the first and second generation quark masses are generated at three-level while the masses of the remaining quark and leptons are of radiative origin. This, together with a rich flavour structure, offers enough complexity to potentially address the flavour problem from a well defined first principles approach. I will finalize commenting on the prospects for new physics searches at the reach of modern experiments.

Organised by

Filipe Veloso e Pedro Costa