Origin of a peculiar extra U(1)

The origin of a family-independent “extra U(1)”, discovered by Barr, Bednarz, and Benesh and independently by Ma, and whose phenomenology has recently been studied by Ma and Roy, is discussed. Even though it satisfies anomaly constraints in a highly economical way, with just a single extra triplet of leptons per family, this extra U(1) cannot come from four-dimensional grand unification. However, it is shown here that it can come from a Pati-Salam scheme with an extra U(1), which explains the otherwise surprising cancellation of anomalies.