Charting the flavor landscape of MSSM-like Abelian heterotic orbifolds

Abstract

Discovering a selection principle and the origin of flavor symmetries from an ultraviolet completion of particle physics is an interesting open task. As a step in this direction, we classify all possible flavor symmetries of 4D massless spectra emerging from supersymmetric Abelian orbifold compactifications, including roto-translations and non-factorizable compact spaces, for generic moduli values. Although these symmetries are valid in all string theories, we focus on the E8 x E8 heterotic string. We perform the widest known search of E8 x E8 Abelian orbifold compactifications, yielding over 121,000 models with MSSM-like features. About 75.4% of these models exhibit flavor symmetries containing D4 factors and only nearly 1.2% have Delta(54) factors. The remaining models are furnished with purely Abelian flavor symmetries. Our findings suggest that, should particle phenomenology arise from a heterotic orbifold, it could accommodate only one of these flavor symmetries.