Flavour changing neutral currents in intersecting brane models

Abstract

Intersecting D-brane models provide an attractive explanation of family replication in the context of string theory. We show, however, that the localization of fermion families at different brane intersections in the extra dimensions introduces flavour changing neutral currents mediated by the Kaluza-Klein excitations of the gauge fields. This is a generic feature in these models, and it implies stringent bounds on the mass of the lightest Kaluza-Klein modes (becoming severe when the compactification radii are larger than the string length). We present the full string calculation of four-fermion interactions in models with intersecting D-branes, recovering the field theory result. This reveals other stringy sources of flavour violation, which give bounds that are complementary to the KK bounds (i.e. they become severe when the compactification radii are comparable to the string length). Taken together these bounds imply that the string scale is larger than $M_s\gtrsim 10^2$ TeV, implying that non-supersymmetric cases are phenomenologically disfavoured.