Mean-field gauge interactions in five dimensions II. The orbifold Original Research Article

We study Gauge–Higgs Unification in five dimensions on the lattice by means of the mean-field expansion. We formulate it for the case of an image pure gauge theory and orbifold boundary conditions along the extra dimension, which explicitly break the gauge symmetry to image on the boundaries. Our main result is that the gauge boson mass computed from the static potential along four-dimensional hyperplanes is non-zero implying spontaneous symmetry breaking. This observation supports earlier data from Monte Carlo simulations in Irges and Knechtli (2007) .