Anomalies of Discrete Symmetries and Gauge Coupling Unification

Abstract

The anomaly of a discrete symmetry is defined as the Jacobian of the path-integral measure. Assuming that the anomaly at low energies is cancelled by the Green-Schwarz (GS) mechanism at a fundamental scale, we investigate possible Kac-Moody levels for anomalous discrete family symmetries. As the first example, we consider discrete abelian baryon number and lepton number symmetries in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with the see-saw mechanism, and we find that the ordinary unification of gauge couplings is inconsistent with the GS conditions, indicating the possible existence of further Higgs doublets. We consider various recently proposed supersymmetric models with a non-abelian discrete family symmetry. In a supersymmetric example with $Q_{6}$ family symmetry, the GS conditions are such that the gauge coupling unification appears close to the Planck scale.