The Flavor of Non-Abelian Orbifolds

Abstract: In string model building, flavor symmetries can arise from the geometric features of the compactification space. In the case of heterotic orbifold models, modular and traditional flavor symmetries can be related to both geometric and algebraic properties of the orbifold space group. Our goal is to study the origin of moduli-independent discrete flavor symmetries in symmetric heterotic orbifolds with non-Abelian point groups. We develop various methods based on the Abelianization and the geometric automorphisms of the orbifold space group to determine these symmetries and their associated charges for matter fields. Notably, our methods were applied to all 331 non-Abelian affine geometries, including roto-translations, suitable for delivering N=1 supersymmetric heterotic compactifications in four dimensions. This provides additional motivation to pursue the derivation of new types of phenomenologically viable models from string theory.