Variants of the Standard Model with Electroweak-Singlet Quarks

Abstract

The successful description of current data provided by the Standard Model includes fundamental fermions that are color-singlets and electroweak-nonsinglets, but no fermions that are electroweak-singlets and color-nonsinglets. In an effort to understand the absence of such fermions, we construct and study {\it gedanken} models that do contain electroweak-singlet chiral quark fields. These models exhibit several distinctive properties, including the absence of any neutral lepton and the fact that both the $(uud)$ and $(ddu)$ nucleons are electrically charged. We also explore how such models could arise as low-energy limits of grand unified theories and, in this more restrictive context, we show that they exhibit further exotic properties.