Symmetry Breaking in Six Dimensional Flux Compactification Scenarios

Abstract

Motivated by the electroweak hierarchy problem, we consider theories with two extra dimensions in which the four-dimensional scalar fields are components of gauge boson in full space, namely the Gauge-Higgs unification framework. We briefly explain the basics features of "flux compactification", i.e. compactification in presence of a background (magnetic) flux. In particular we recall how chirality and symmetry breaking can be obtained in this context. More in details, we find and catalogue all possible degenerate zero-energy stable configurations in the case of trivial or non-trivial 't Hooft flux, for a SU(N) gauge theory on a torus. We describe the residual symmetries of each vacua and the four-dimensional effective spectrum in terms of continuous and discrete parameters, respectively.