Gravitational Imprints of Flavor Hierarchies

TL;DR

This paper proposes that gravitational wave signals from cosmological phase transitions could serve as a unique probe of the mechanisms behind the flavor hierarchies in particle physics, which are otherwise difficult to access experimentally.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that multi-peaked gravitational wave signals can reveal the origin of flavor hierarchies and demonstrates this with the $PS^3$ model.

Findings

Potential detection of up to three gravitational wave peaks.

Ground- and space-based observatories could observe these signals.

The $PS^3$ model predicts distinctive gravitational wave signatures.

Abstract

The mass hierarchy among the three generations of quarks and charged leptons is one of the greatest mysteries in particle physics. In various flavor models, the origin of this phenomenon is attributed to a series of hierarchical spontaneous symmetry breakings, most of which are beyond the reach of particle colliders. We point out that the observation of a multi-peaked stochastic gravitational wave signal from a series of cosmological phase transitions could well be a unique probe of the mechanism behind flavor hierarchies. To illustrate this point, we show how near future ground- and space-based gravitational wave observatories could detect up to three peaks in the recently proposed $PS^3$ model.