A clockwork solution to the flavor puzzle

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel clockwork model of flavor that explains quark mass hierarchies and mixing angles, allowing for potentially light new physics detectable at colliders, and compares it with existing flavor solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a clockwork framework for flavor that naturally accounts for hierarchies and remains compatible with flavor constraints, offering new collider phenomenology insights.

Findings

Clockwork models can explain quark flavor hierarchies.

Allowed new physics scale can be just above 1 TeV.

Collider signatures of gear spectra are discussed.

Abstract

We introduce a set of clockwork models of flavor that can naturally explain the large hierarchies of the Standard Model quark masses and mixing angles. Since the clockwork only contains chains of new vector-like fermions without any other dynamical fields, the flavor constraints allow for relatively light new physics scale. For two benchmarks with gear masses just above 1 TeV, allowed by flavor constraints, we discuss the collider searches and the possible ways of reconstructing gear spectra at the LHC. We also examine the similarities and differences with the other common solutions to the SM flavor puzzle, i.e., with the Froggatt-Nielsen models, where we identify a new {\it clockworked } version, and with the Randall-Sundrum models.