On flavor symmetries of phenomenologically viable string compactifications

Abstract: Heterotic orbifolds can explain the origin of flavor symmetries and the flavor representations of matter fields in particle physics as a result of the geometric properties of the associated string states in the compact space. After a review of the method to obtain flavor symmetries in these models, we determine the most frequent non-Abelian flavor symmetries appearing in promising Abelian heterotic orbifolds. Interestingly, these symmetries correspond only to D_4, Delta(54) and products of these symmetries and Abelian factors. A large set of promising models exhibits purely Abelian flavor symmetries. We finally explore the phenomenological potential of a sample model endowed with Delta(54) assuming certain ad hoc flavon expectation values.