Mass Mixing, the Fourth Generation, and the Kinematic Higgs Mechanism

Abstract

We describe how to construct chiral fermion mass terms using Dirac-Kahler (DK) spinors. Classical massive DK spinors are shown to be equivalent to four generations of Dirac spinors with equal mass coupled to a background U(2,2) gauge field. Quantization breaks U(2,2) to U(2)xU(2), lifts mass spectrum degeneracy, and generates a non-trivial mass mixing matrix.