The minimal flavor structure of quarks and leptons

Abstract

A flavor structure with minimal parameters is proposed to address the fermion mass hierarchy and flavor mixing for quarks and leptons. Yukawa interaction is reconstructed in a new basis to show a common flat structure for up-type quarks, down-type quarks, charged leptons, and Dirac neutrinos. A flavor symmetry is found from the hierarchy masses of quarks and leptons, which dominated Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) mixing for quarks and Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata mixing for leptons. It results that the minimal flavor structure successfully addresses flavor mixings of quarks and leptons even in the mass hierarchy limit, which means that mass hierarchy and flavor mixing are two independent questions. As a prediction, a sum rule on the mixing angles and CP violation phase (CPV) is suggested, which explains the smallness of s 13 as a natural result of the mass hierarchy. Generalizing the flat structure to quarks and leptons, a unified Yukawa interaction is also achieved for all fermions with only a single coupling.