Minimal supersymmetric grand unified theory: Symmetry breaking and the particle spectrum

We discuss in detail the symmetry breaking and related issues in the minimal renormalizable supersymmetric grand unified theory. We find all the possible patterns of symmetry breaking, compute the associated particle spectrum and study its impact on the physical scales of the theory. In particular, the complete mass matrices of the SU(2) doublets and the color triplets are computed in connection with the doublet-triplet splitting and the $d=5$ proton decay. We explicitly construct the two light Higgs doublets as a function of the Higgs superpotential parameters. This provides a framework for the analysis of phenomenological implications of the theory, to be carried out in a second paper.