Spontaneous symmetry breaking and fermion chirality in higher-dimensional gauge theory

The number of chiral fermions may change in the course of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We discuss solutions of a six-dimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills theory based on SO(12). In the resulting effective four-dimensional theory they can be interpreted as spontaneous breaking of a gauge group SO(10) to $\text{H}\text{=}\text{SU}\text{(3)}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>C</mtext>}}\text{×}\text{SU}\text{(2)}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>L</mtext>}}\text{×}\text{U}\text{(1)}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>R</mtext>}}\text{×}\text{U}\text{(10)}{}_{\mathrm{B?L}}$. For all solutions, the fermions which are chiral with respect to $\text{H}$ form standard generations. However, the number of generations for the solutions with broken SO(10) may be different compared to the symmetric solutions. All solutions considered here exhibit a local generation group SU(2)_G × U(1)_G. For the solutions with broken SO(10) symmetry, the leptons and quarks within one generation transform differently with respect to SU(2)_G × U(1)_G. Spontaneous symmetry breaking also modifies the SO(10) relations among Yukawa couplings. All this has important consequences for possible fermion mass relations obtained from higher-dimensional theories.