Flavor's Delight

TL;DR

This paper compares top-down and bottom-up approaches to discrete flavor symmetries in particle physics, aiming to unify their descriptions and identify promising symmetry groups for explaining the flavor sector.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of traditional and modular flavor symmetries from string theory and bottom-up models, proposing a unified framework and highlighting future research directions.

Findings

Identification of promising flavor symmetry groups

Comparison of top-down and bottom-up approaches

Discussion of gaps for future model building

Abstract

Discrete flavor symmetries provide a promising approach to understand the flavor sector of the standard model of particle physics. Top-down (TD) explanations from string theory reveal two different types of such flavor symmetries: traditional and modular flavor symmetries that combine to the eclectic flavor group. There have been many bottom-up (BU) constructions to fit experimental data within this scheme. We compare TD and BU constructions to identify the most promising groups and try to give a unified description. Although there is some progress in joining BU and TD approaches, we point out some gaps that have to be closed with future model building.