the electroweak scale, which is tightly constrained. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider a similar mechanism as applied to other areas of physics beyond the SM, in particular theories of flavour.

It is well appreciated that the SM does not address the flavour problem, namely the origin of the three fermion families and their pattern of masses and mixing angles. Some theories of flavour beyond the SM postulate a spontaneously broken family symmetry under which the three families form a triplet. In such models, the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of the family symmetry is achieved via the introduction of new triplet scalar fields called flavons that obtain VEVs which are aligned in various directions via an alignment potential (for a review see e.g. [@King:2013eh]). Since such theories are rather involved, it is therefore natural to ask if extra dimensions can play a role in breaking the family symmetry, analogous to the idea of GHU discussed above.

In this paper we propose the idea that flavons can emerge from extra dimensional gauge fields, which we call gauge-flavon unification (GFU) in analogy to GHU. GFU assumes that there is some gauged continuous non-Abelian family symmetry in extra dimensions, where the flavons emerge 