Radiative symmetry breaking on D-branes at non-supersymmetric singularities

The possibility of radiative gauge symmetry breaking on D3-branes at non-supersymmetric orbifold singularities is examined. As an example, a simple model of D3-branes at non-supersymmetric C-3/Z(6) singularity with some D7-branes for the cancellations of RR tadpoles in twisted sectors is analyzed in detail. We find that there are no tachyon modes in twisted sectors, and NS-NS tadpoles in twisted sectors are canceled out, though uncanceled tadpoles and tachyon modes exist in untwisted sectors. This means that this singularity background is a stable solution of string theory at tree level, though some specific compactification of six-dimensional space should be considered for a consistent untwisted sector. On D3-brane three massless "Higgs doublet fields" and three family "up-type quarks" are realized at tree level. Other fermion fields, "down-type quarks" and "leptons", can be realized as massless modes of the open strings stretching between D3-branes and D7-branes. The Higgs doublet fields have Yukawa couplings with up-type quarks, and they also have self-couplings which give a scalar potential without flat directions. Since there is no supersymmetry, the radiative corrections may naturally develop negative Higgs mass squared and "electroweak symmetry breaking". We explicitly calculate the open string one-loop correction to the Higgs mass squared from twisted sectors, and find that the negative value is indeed realized in this specific model. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.