| Five-dimensional N = 2 Yang-Mills-Einstein supergravity and its couplings to hyper and tensor multiplets are considered on an orbifold spacetime of the form M4 x S1/Gamma, where Gamma is a discrete group. As is well known in such cases, supersymmetry is broken to N = 1 on the orbifold fixed planes, and chiral 4D theories can be obtained from bulk hypermultiplets (or from the coupling of fixed-plane supported fields). Five-dimensional gauge symmetries are broken by boundary conditions for the fields, which are equivalent to some set of Gamma-parity assignments in the orbifold theory, allowing for arbitrary rank reduction. Furthermore, Wilson lines looping from one boundary to the other can break bulk gauge groups, or give rise to vacuum expectation values for scalars on the boundaries, which can result in spontaneous breaking of boundary gauge groups. The broken gauge symmetries do not survive as global symmetries of the low energy theories below the compactification scale due to 4 D minimal couplings to gauge fields. Axionic fields are a generic feature, just as in any compactification of M-theory (or string theory for that matter), and we exhibit the form of this field and its role as the QCD axion, capable of resolving the strong CP problem. The main motivation for the orbifold theories here is taken to be orbifold-GUTS, wherein a unified gauge group is sought in higher dimensions while allowing the orbifold reduction to handle problems such as rapid proton decay, exotic matter, mass hierarchies, etc. To that end, we discuss the allowable minimal SU(5), SO(10) and E6 GUT theories with all fields living in five dimensions. It is argued that, within the class of homogeneous quaternionic scalar manifolds characterizing the hypermultiplet couplings in 5D, supergravity admits a restricted set of theories that yield minimal phenomenological field content. In addition, non-compact gaugings are a novel feature of supergravity theories, and in particular we consider the example of an SU(5,1) YMESGT in which all of the fields of the theory are connected by local (susy and gauge) transformations that are symmetries of the Lagrangian. Such non-compact gaugings allow a novel type of gauge-Higgs unification in higher dimensions. The possibility of boundary-localized fields is considered only via anomaly arguments. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
