Grand Unified Theories without the Desert

TL;DR

The paper proposes a desert-free Grand Unified Theory by placing the MSSM gauge sector and its GUT extension in a warped 5D AdS5 bulk with matter localized on a boundary. It shows that, despite the extra dimension, the gauge couplings run logarithmically at one loop like in 4D, preserving MSSM unification, while proton-decay operators remain suppressed by a high M_GUT. The framework predicts TeV-scale KK excitations of GUT fields and SM gauge bosons, offering collider-testable signatures, along with universal, tree-level running of couplings above the KK scale. Overall, it provides a concrete mechanism to unify forces without a large desert and outlines distinctive phenomenology at TeV energies.

Abstract

We present a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that has GUT fields with masses of the order of a TeV, but at the same time preserves (at the one-loop level) the success of gauge-coupling unification of the MSSM and the smallness of proton decay operators. This scenario is based on a five-dimensional theory with the extra dimension compactified as in the Randall-Sundrum model. The MSSM gauge sector and its GUT extension live in the 5D bulk, while the matter sector is localized on a 4D boundary.