Higgsless fermion masses and unitarity

Abstract

We discuss the consistency of fermion mass generation by boundary conditions and brane localized terms in higher dimensional Higgsless models of gauge symmetry breaking. The sum rules imposed by tree-level unitarity and Ward Identities are applied to check the consistency of mass generation by orbifold projections and more general boundary conditions consistent with the variational principle. We find that the sum rules are satisfied for boundary conditions corresponding to brane localized mass and kinetic terms consistent with the reduced gauge symmetry on the brane.