Abstract
Can the Large Hadron Collider explain the masses and mixings of the known fermions? A promising possibility is that these masses and mixings are determined by flavor symmetries that also govern new particles that will appear at the LHC. We consider well-motivated examples in supersymmetry with both gravity and gauge mediation. Contrary to spreading belief, new physics need not be minimally flavor violating. We build nonminimally flavor violating models that successfully explain all known lepton masses and mixings, but span a wide range in their predictions for slepton flavor violation. In natural and favorable cases, these models have metastable sleptons and are characterized by fully reconstructible events. We outline many flavor measurements that are then possible and describe their prospects for resolving both the standard model and new physics flavor puzzles at the Large Hadron Collider.
Highlights
Can the Large Hadron Collider explain the masses and mixings of the known fermions? A promising possibility is that these masses and mixings are determined by flavor symmetries that govern new particles that will appear at the LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to shed light on the hierarchy problem, and the potential for discovering the Higgs boson and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking is largely responsible for the keen anticipation for LHC data in the coming years
The models we present are consistent with all known lepton masses and mixings, and they satisfy all flavor-changing neutral currents (FCNC) and rare decay constraints
Summary
The standard model (SM) of particle physics suffers from problems in both its gauge and flavor sectors. The same set of horizontal charges will be further constrained if existing flavor-changing neutral currents (FCNC) measurements are augmented by flavor measurements at the LHC From this viewpoint, supersymmetry provides a simple, representative example of new physics in which new particles and the SM fermions behave identically under any underlying flavor theory. —The sfermion mixings, that is, the flavor-changing gaugino-sfermion-fermion couplings, can be suppressed Such alignment could be the result of an approximate horizontal symmetry. By combining the information from low and high energy flavor measurements, we may be able to narrow the allowed range considerably, select a specific supersymmetric model, and eventually find the solution to both the new physics and SM flavor puzzles. One of the general conclusions of this work is that the question of whether new physics is MFV or nonMFV is open, and it is of great interest to determine the LHC’s potential for distinguishing between models that exhibit MFV and models that do not.
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