Dimensional deconstruction

In theoretical physics, dimensional deconstruction is a method to construct d-dimensional theories that behave as higher-dimensional theories in a certain range of energies. The resulting theory is a gauge theory whose gauge group is a direct product of many copies of the same group; each copy may be interpreted as the gauge group located at a particular point along a new, discrete, "deconstructed" (d+1)st dimension. The spectrum of matter fields is a set of bifundamental representations expressed by a quiver diagram that is analogous to lattices in lattice gauge theory.

"Deconstruction" in physics was introduced by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Andrew Cohen and Howard Georgi, (hep-th/0104005) working at Harvard and Boston University, and independently by Christopher T. Hill, Stefan Pokorski and Jing Wang (hep-th/0104035) working at Fermilab. The latter authors "latticized" the extra dimensions while maintaining the full gauge symmetries to obtain the low energy effective description of the physics. This leads to a rationale for extensions of the standard model based upon product gauge groups, GxGxGx ... such as are anticipated in "topcolor" models of electroweak symmetry breaking. The little Higgs theories are also examples of phenomenologically interesting theories inspired by deconstruction.

External link

• Littlest Higgs model and deconstruction: an introduction