Geometric origin of large lepton mixing in a higher-dimensional spacetime

The large mixing in the lepton sector observed in the recent neutrino-oscillation experiments strongly suggests that nature of left-handed lepton doublets is very different from that of left-handed quark doublets. This means that there is a big disparity between the matter multiplets 5*'s and 10's in the SU(5) unified theory. We show that this big difference can be explained in a six-dimensional spacetime compactified on the T-2/Z(3) orbifold. That is, we propose to put three families of 5*'s on three equivalent fixed points of the orbifold and the three 10's in the two-dimensional bulk. We construct an explicit model realizing this situation and show that the democratic mass structure in the lepton sector is naturally obtained and hence the model explains the observed bi-large lepton mixing and simultaneously the required small mixing U-e3. The mass matrices and mixing in the quark sector are also briefly discussed. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.