Tracking gauge symmetry factorizability on intervals Original Research Article

We track the gauge symmetry breaking pattern by boundary conditions on fifth and higher-dimensional intervals. It is found that, with Dirichlet–Neumann boundary conditions, the Kaluza–Klein decomposition in five-dimension for arbitrary gauge group can always be factorized into that for separate subsets of at most two gauge symmetries, and so is completely solvable. Accordingly, we present a simple and systematic geometric method to unambiguously identify the gauge breaking/mixing content by general set of Dirichlet–Neumann boundary conditions. We then formulate a limit theorem on gauge symmetry factorizability to recapitulate this interesting feature. Albeit the breaking/mixing, a particularly simple check of orthogonality and normalization of fieldsʹ modes in effective 4-dim picture is explicitly obtained. An interesting chained-mixing of gauge symmetries in higher dimensions by Dirichlet–Neumann boundary conditions is also explicitly constructed. This study has direct applications to higgsless/GUT model building.