Flavor Symmetry Breaking and Vacuum Alignment on Orbifolds

Flavor symmetry has been widely studied for figuring out the masses and mixing angles of standard-model fermions. In this paper we present a framework for handling flavor symmetry breaking where the symmetry breaking is triggered by boundary conditions of scalar fields in extra-dimensional space. The alignment of scalar expectation values is achieved without referring to any details of scalar potential and its minimization procedure. As applications to non-abelian discrete flavor symmetries, illustrative lepton mass models are constructed where the S3 and A4 flavor symmetries are broken down to the directions leading to the tribimaximal form of lepton mixing and realistic mass patterns.