34 research outputs found
Quark mixing from softly broken symmetries
Quark flavor mixing may originate in the soft breaking of horizontal
symmetries. Those symmetries, which in the simplest case are three family U(1)
groups, are obeyed only by the dimension-4 Yukawa couplings and lead, when
unbroken, to the absence of mixing. Their breaking may arise from the
dimension-3 mass terms of SU(2)-singlet vector-like quarks. Those gauge-singlet
mass terms break the horizontal symmetries at a scale much higher than the
Fermi scale, yet softly, leading to quark mixing while the quark masses remain
unsuppressed.Comment: 9 pages, plain Latex, no figure