Higgs versus Matter in the Heterotic Landscape

Understand

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.