Statistical understanding of quark and lepton masses in Gaussian landscapes

Abstract

The fundamental theory of nature may allow a large landscape of vacua. Even if the theory contains a unified gauge symmetry, the 22 flavor parameters of the standard model, including neutrino masses, may be largely determined by the statistics of this landscape, and not by any symmetry. Then the measured values of the flavor parameters do not lead to any fundamental symmetries, but are statistical accidents; their precise values do not provide any insights into the fundamental theory, rather the overall pattern of flavor reflects the underlying landscape. We investigate whether random selection from the statistics of a simple landscape can explain the broad patterns of quark, charged lepton, and neutrino masses and mixings. We propose Gaussian landscapes as simplified models of landscapes where Yukawa couplings result from overlap integrals of zero-mode wave functions in higher-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories. In terms of just five free parameters, such landscapes can account for all gross features of flavor, including the hierarchy of quark and charged-lepton masses; small quark mixing angles in the basis with quarks arranged according to mass, with 13 mixing less than 12 and 23 mixing; very light Majorana neutrino masses, with the solar to atmospheric neutrino mass ratio consistent with data; distributions for leptonic mixings $\mathrm{sin}2{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{12}$ and $\mathrm{sin}2{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{23}$ that are peaked at large values, while the distribution for $\mathrm{sin}2{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{13}$ is peaked at low values; and order unity $CP$-violating phases in both the quark and lepton sectors. While the statistical distributions for flavor parameters are broad, the distributions are robust to changes in the geometry of the extra dimensions. Constraining the distributions by loose cuts about observed values leads to narrower distributions for neutrino measurements of ${\ensuremath{\theta}}_{13}$, $CP$ violation, and neutrinoless double beta decay.