Simplified models of flavourful leptoquarks

Abstract

We study the implications of single leptoquark extensions of the Standard Model (SM) under the assumption that their enhanced Yukawa sectors are invariant under global Abelian flavour symmetries already present in SM mass terms. Such symmetries, assumed to be the ‘residual’ subgroups of an ultra-violet flavour theory, have previously been considered in order to predict fermionic mixing angles. Here we focus instead on their effect on the novel flavour structures sourced by the leptoquark representations that address the present {R}_{K^{(star )}} anomalies in semileptonic rare B-decays. Combined with existing flavour data, the residual symmetries prove to be extremely constraining; we find that the (quark-lepton) leptoquark Yukawa couplings fall within mathcal {O}(10) highly predictive patterns, each with only a single free parameter, when ‘normal’ (SM-like) hierarchies are assumed. In addition, proton decay for the scalar SU(2) triplet representation is naturally avoided in the residual symmetry approach without relying on further model building. Our results indicate that a simultaneous explanation for the {R}_{K^{(star )}} anomalies and the flavour puzzle may be achieved in a simplified, model-independent formalism.