UC Berkeley

The vanishing of the Higgs quartic coupling of the Standard Model at high energies may be explained by spontaneous breaking of Higgs Parity. Taking Higgs Parity to originate from the Left-Right symmetry of the SO(10) gauge group, leads to a new scheme for precision gauge coupling unification that is consistent with proton decay. We compute the relevant running of couplings and threshold corrections to allow a precise correlation among Standard Model parameters. The scheme has a built-in solution for obtaining a realistic value for mb/mτ , which further improves the precision from gauge coupling unification, allowing the QCD coupling constant to be predicted to the level of 1% or, alternatively, the top quark mass to 0.2%. Future measurements of these parameters may significantly constrain the detailed structure of the theory. We also study an SO(10) embedding of quark and lepton masses, showing how large neutrino mixing is compatible with small quark mixing, and predict a normal neutrino mass hierarchy. The strong CP problem may be explained by combining Higgs Parity with space-time parity.