Top-Down Anatomy of Flavor Symmetry Breakdown

TL;DR

This paper explores how string theory compactifications can naturally lead to complex flavor symmetry groups and their breakdown patterns, offering insights into the origin of flavor hierarchies in quarks and leptons.

Contribution

It presents a top-down framework connecting string-derived flavor groups with their symmetry breaking patterns, advancing the understanding of flavor structure in particle physics.

Findings

Identifies breakdown patterns of eclectic flavor groups via moduli and flavon vevs.

Proposes a flavor scheme with hierarchical structures from vev alignments.

Suggests top-down constraints guide realistic flavor model building.

Abstract

A top-down approach to the flavor puzzle leads to eclectic flavor groups which include modular and traditional flavor symmetries. Based on examples of semirealistic T2/Z3 orbifold compactifications of heterotic string theory, we discuss the breakdown patterns of the eclectic flavor group via the interplay of vacuum expectation values (vevs) of moduli and flavon fields. This leads to an attractive flavor scheme with various possibilities to obtain "flavor hierarchies" through the alignment of these vevs. Despite the fact that the top-down approach gives strong restrictions for bottom-up flavor model building, it seems to be well suited to provide a realistic flavor pattern for quarks and leptons.