Project Details
Projekt
New Physics and Flavour Symmetries
Applicant
Professor Dr. Thorsten Feldmann
Subject Area
Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
Term
from 2012 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 214254430
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics contains three “families” of matter particles (quarks and leptons). The fundamental strong and electroweak interaction terms are universal for each family, but this flavour symmetry are broken by the so-called Yukawa interactions with the ubiquitous Higgs boson. As a consequence, different quark and lepton species, so-called “flavours”, have different masses and different mixing angles in weak-interaction transitions. It would be desirable to find an underlying theoretical principle or a dynamical mechanism which could naturally explain the observed hierarchies in masses and mixing angles. However, so far, no canonical theory of flavour has been established. This “flavour puzzle” becomes even more pronounced in the presence of “new physics” (NP), i.e. new particles and interactions beyond the SM, whose flavour parameters must be tuned to a high degree in order to fulfill the experimental constraints, in particular from rare quark decays which, in the SM, are suppressed by small Yukawa couplings and/or small mixing angles. In this project, we are going to investigate different possibilities to realize dynamical flavour-symmetry breaking (FSB) in the quark sector. In particular, we are going to study to what extent the FSB can be generated from a suitable effective potential, and how this will be influenced by different choices for the NP particle spectrum. Furthermore, we will identify NP benchmark models with specific flavour properties on the basis of flavour-symmetry considerations, including so-called minimal-flavour violating (MFV) scenarios as well as non-MFV cases. Finally, we will study the relation between FSB and electro-weak symmetry breaking and the possible embedding of models with dynamical FSB into more fundamental BSM extensions at high energies.
DFG Programme
Research Units
