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 four-dimensional massless spectra emerging from supersymmetric Abelian orbifold compactifications, including roto-translations and nonfactorizable tori, for generic moduli values. Although these symmetries are valid in all string theories, we focus on the E 8 × E 8 heterotic string. We perform the widest known search of E 8 × E 8 Abelian orbifold compactifications, yielding over 94,000 models with MSSM-like features. About 70.5% of these models exhibit flavor symmetries containing D 4 factors and only nearly 1.5% have Δ ( 54 ) factors. The remaining models are furnished with purely Abelian flavor symmetries. Our findings suggest that should particle phenomenology arise from such a heterotic orbifold, it could accommodate only one of these flavor symmetries.
展开▼
