Grand Unification in Higher Dimensions

We have recently proposed an alternative picture for the physics at the scale of gauge coupling unification, where the unified symmetry is realized in higher dimensions but is broken locally by a symmetry breaking defect. Gauge coupling unification, the quantum numbers of quarks and leptons and the longevity of the proton arise as phenomena of the symmetrical bulk, while the lightness of the Higgs doublets and the masses of the light quarks and leptons probe the symmetry breaking defect. Moreover, the framework is extremely predictive if the effective higher dimensional theory is valid over a large energy interval up to the scale of strong coupling. Precise agreement with experiments is obtained in the simplest theory --- SU(5) in five dimensions with two Higgs multiplets propagating in the bulk. The weak mixing angle is predicted to be sin^2theta_w = 0.2313 \pm 0.0004, which fits the data with extraordinary accuracy. The compactification scale and the strong coupling scale are determined to be M_c \simeq 5 x 10^14 GeV and M_s \simeq 1 x 10^17 GeV, respectively. Proton decay with a lifetime of order 10^{34} years is expected with a variety of final states such as e^+pi^0, and several aspects of flavor, including large neutrino mixing angles, are understood by the geometrical locations of the matter fields. When combined with a particular supersymmetry breaking mechanism, the theory predicts large lepton flavor violating mu -> e and tau -> mu transitions, with all superpartner masses determined by only two free parameters. The predicted value of the bottom quark mass from Yukawa unification agrees well with the data. This paper is mainly a review of the work presented in hep-ph/0103125, hep-ph/0111068 and hep-ph/0205067