Higher-dimensional routes to the Standard Model fermions

Abstract

In the old spirit of Kaluza-Klein, we consider a spacetime of the form $P = M_4 \times K$, where $K$ is the Lie group $\mathrm{SU}(3)$ equipped with a left-invariant metric that is not fully right-invariant. We observe that a complete generation of fermionic fields can be encoded in the 64 components of a single spinor over the 12-dimensional spacetime. The behaviour of the spinorial function along the internal space $K$ can be chosen so that, after pairing and fibre-integration over $K$, the resulting Dirac kinetic terms in four dimensions couple to the $\mathfrak{u}(1) \oplus \mathfrak{su}(2) \oplus \mathfrak{su}(3)$ gauge fields in the exact chiral representations present in the Standard Model. Although we describe the action of the internal Dirac operator on the 12-dimensional spinor, the full calculation of the fermionic mass terms produced by the model is longer and is not carried out here. We calculate instead the action of the internal Laplace operator on the spinor components.