Recent discovery of neutrino large mixings implies the large mixings in the diagonalizing matrices of $\bf\bar 5$ fields in $SU(5)$ grand unified theory (GUT), while the diagonalizing matrices of $\bf 10$ fields of $SU(5)$ are expected to have small mixings like Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. We calculate the predictions of flavor changing nucleon decays (FCND) in $SU(5)$, $SO(10)$, and $E_6$ GUT models which have the above features for mixings. We found that FCND can be the main decay mode especially for GUT with higher rank unification group. Recent report for $P\rightarrow π^0μ^+$ process implies $E_6$ or $SO(10)$ GUT if the signal is from the nucleon decay.
In $\XQM$, a quark can emit Goldstone bosons. The flavor symmetry breaking in the Goldstone boson emission process is used to intepret the nucleon flavor-spin structure. In this paper, we study the inner structure of constituent quarks implied in $\XQM$ caused by the Goldstone boson emission process in nucleon. From a simplified model Hamiltonian derived from $\XQM$, the intrinsic wave functions of constituent quarks are determined. Then the obtained transition probabilities of the emission of Goldstone boson from a quark can give a reasonable interpretation to the flavor symmetry breaking in …
Using the light front wave functions for the nucleons in a quark model in AdS/QCD, we calculate the nucleon electromagnetic form factors. The flavor decompositions of the nucleon form factors are calculated from the GPDs in this model. We show that the nucleon form factors and their flavor decompositions calculated in AdS/QCD are in agreement with experimental data.
A phenomenological ansatz for the flavor-asymmetry of the light sea distributions of the nucleon, based on the Pauli exclusion principle, is proposed. This ansatz is compatible with the measured flavor-asymmetry of the unpolarized sea distributions, $\bar{d}>\bar{u}$, of the nucleon. A prediction for the corresponding polarized flavor-asymmetry is presented and shown to agree with predictions of (chiral quark--soliton) models which successfully reproduced the flavor-asymmetry of the unpolarized sea.
The recent progress on our understanding of the flavor structure of unpolarized and polarized nucleon sea is reviewed. The large flavor asymmetry between the up and down sea quark distributions is now well established. This asymmetry strongly suggests the importance of the mesonic degrees of freedom in the description of the nucleon sea. The strong connection between the flavor structure and the spin structure of the nucleon sea is emphasized. Possible future measurements for testing various theoretical models are also discussed.
Recent deep inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan experiments have revealed a surprisingly large asymmetry between the up and down sea quark distributions in the nucleon. The current status of the flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea is reviewed. Implications of various theoretical models and possible future measurements are also discussed.
The following proceedings contain a theory perspective on the flavor changing neutral current anomalies reported by LHCb on the ratios $B\to K^{(*)} μμ/B\to K^{(*)} ee$
In the contest of a Two Higgs Doublet Model without flavor conservation, the presence of Flavor Changing Neutral Scalar Currents may affect in particular the couplings of the top quark. Some ideas on how to look for new signals from Flavor Changing Interactions at the next generation of lepton colliders are presented.
Supersymmetric contributions to the neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) are studied taking account of the flavor changing interactions. We found that the gluino contribution is sensitive to the flavor changing interaction. Enhancement of neutron EDM via flavor mixing effects is possible when the squark mass difference between the different generations is sizable. As an example, the results of the SUSY SU(5) GUT with right-handed neutrinos are briefly discussed.
Flavor changing neutral current processes are studied in the littlest Higgs model with T-parity. It is found that the logarithmic divergence reported earlier in Z boson flavor changing processes is exactly canceled by contributions from additional interaction terms of heavy fermions and the Z boson. Phenomenological impact on the K --> pi nu nu_bar processes is discussed.
The prospect of observing the flavor changing decay $\fH\to t\bar c$ of a neutral Higgs boson produced via $s$-channel and its subsequent decay into $t\bar c$ is considered at a $μ^+μ^-$ collider. Numerical estimates are given in the context of a two Higgs doublet model with flavor changing couplings. It is found that for many values of the model parameters such {\it tree-level} flavor changing decays will be produced at an observable level. In addition studies of the helicity of the top will allow the determination of the relative strengths of the flavor changing Higgs couplings and these may…
In the light of the recent measurement of the muon anmalous magnetic moment $a_μ$ by the Muon $(g-2)$ Collaboration, we examine the contribution to $a_μ$ from the exchange of flavor changing scalars. Assuming that the heavier generations have larger flavor changing couplings, we obtain a bound on $μ- τ$ Yukawa coupling for a given scalar mass. Constraints on other flavor changing/conserving couplings are also obtained from the lepton flavor violating decays of muon and tau lepton, and bounds on the branching ratio of $τ\to 3 e$, $μ\to 3 e$ and $τ\to e μe$ processes are predicted.
We discuss the flavor asymmetry of polarized light antiquarks in the nucleon, $Δ\bar{u}-Δ\bar{d}$. We present a determination of this quantity based on two global QCD analyses of experimental data, DSSV08 and NNPDFpol1.1, in which sea-quark parton distribution functions are determined respectively either from semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering or W-boson production data. The latter have become available only very recently, and their effect on the polarized flavor asymmetry is presented here for the first time. We find that the flavor asymmetry of polarized antiquarks in the nucleon is de…
We have investigated the possibility of discerning mass from flavor changing neutrino interactions induced $ν_μ\to ν_τ$ oscillations in the long baseline neutrino experiments K2K and MINOS. We have found that for virtually any value of the flavor conserving parameter $ε^\prime$ it will be possible to, independently, distinguish these two mechanisms at K2K, if the flavor changing parameter $ε$ is in the range $ε\gsim 0.77$, and at MINOS, if $ε\gsim 0.2$. Moreover, if K2K measures a depletion of the expected $ν_μ$ flux then MINOS will either observe or discard completely flavor changing neutrino…
The flavor structure of the nucleon sea provides unique information to test the statistical parton distributions approach, which imposes strong relations between quark and antiquarks. These properties for unpolarized and helicity distributions have been verified up to now by recent data. We will present here some new results which are a real challenge, also for forthcoming accurate experimental results, mainly in the high Bjorken-$x$ region.
We present a general phenomenological analysis of a class of Two Higgs Doublet Models with Flavor Changing Neutral Currents arising at the tree level. The existing constraints mainly affect the couplings of the first two generations of quarks, leaving the possibility for non negligible Flavor Changing couplings of the top quark open. The next generation of lepton and hadron colliders will offer the right environment to study the physics of the top quark and to unravel the presence of new physics beyond the Standar Model. In this context we discuss some interesting signals from Flavor Changing …
The theoretical predictions of the chiral quark soliton model for the unpolarized and longitudinally polarized structure functions of the nucleon are compared with recent high energy data. The theory is shown to explain all the qualitatively noticeable features of the existing experiments, including the light flavor sea-quark asymmetry for the unpolarized distribution functions established by the NMC measurement as well as very small quark spin fraction of the nucleon indicated by the EMC measurement. Another unique feature of the model is that it predicts sizably large isospin asymmetry also …
We consider flavor changing neutral current effects coming from the $Z'$ exchange in 3-3-1 models. We show that the mass of this extra neutral vector boson may be less than 2 TeV and discuss the problem of quark family discrimination.
It is argued that the topcolor models recently proposed by Hill [1] may face significant constraints from flavor-changing neutral current processes (such as $B-\bar{B}$ mixing) unless the mixing angles between down-type quarks are small. The flavor-changing processes are mediated by scalar bound states which are likely to be light as a result of the near critical dynamics of the $b$-quark sector. The consequences of the latter on the bottom quark mass are also briefly discussed.
Lorentz- and CPT-violating effects initiating two-body electromagnetic flavor-changing decays of charged leptons are studied in the framework of Lorentz-violating effective field theory. An analysis of data from experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institute and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator measuring the branching ratios of these decays provides 576 constraints on independent flavor-changing effects in the charged-lepton sector, consistent with no Lorentz and CPT violation at the level of parts in $10^{-13}$ GeV$^{-1}$ to $10^{-9}$ GeV$^{-1}$.
It has recently been shown that strong interactions underlying electroweak symmetry breaking will induce four-fermion amplitudes proportional to m_t^2, which in turn will influence a variety of flavor changing processes. We argue that the size of these effects are likely to be far below the current experimental bounds.
We study the b --> sγdecay including the next to leading QCD corrections in the two Higgs doublet model with flavor changing neutral currents at the tree level. We find the constraints to the flavor changing parameters of the model, using the experimental results on the branching ratio of B --> X_s γdecay, provided by the CLEO Collaboration, the restrictions coming from the ΔF=2 (F=K,D,B) mixing and the ρparameter.
Several spin and flavor dependent parameters characterizing the strangeness content of the nucleon have been calculated in the chiral constituent quark model with configuration mixing (\chiCQM_{config}) which is known to provide a satisfactory explanation of the ``proton spin crisis'' and related issues. In particular, we have calculated the strange spin polarization Δs, the strangeness contribution to the weak axial vector couplings Δ_8 etc., strangeness contribution to the magnetic moments μ(p)^s etc., the strange quark flavor fraction f_s, the strangeness dependent quark flavor ratios \frac…
We carry out a general analysis of tree level flavor changing neutral currents in the context of 331 models, considering arbitrary quark and gauge boson mixing matrices. The results are applied to definite textures of quark mass matrices, and differences between various 331 scenarios are pointed out.
We study the flavor changing t-> c l_1^- l_2^+ decay in the framework of the general two Higgs doublet model, the so called model III. We predict the branching ratio for l_1=τ, l_2=μat the order of magnitude of BR \sim 10^{-8}.
We investigate the possibility of having sizable effects from flavor changing neutral currents at the tree level in a particular class of Two Higgs Doublet Models. Constraints from existing experimental information are discussed. Some interesting signals at the future generation of lepton colliders are illustrated.
Models with a non-universal Z' exhibit in general flavor changing neutral currents (FCNC) at tree-level. When the Z' couplings favor the third generation, flavor changing transitions of the form Z'tc and Z'tu could be large enough to be observable at the LHC. In this paper we explore this possibility using the associated production of a single top-quark with the Z' and find that integrated luminosities of a few hundred fb$^{-1}$ are necessary to probe the interesting region of parameter space.
If $t\rightarrow hq$ ($q=c,u$) or $h\rightarrowτ\ell$ ($\ell=μ,e$) decays are observed, it will be a clear signal of new physics. We investigate whether natural and viable flavor models can saturate the present direct upper bounds without violating the indirect constraints from low energy loop processes. We carry out our analysis in two theoretical frameworks: minimal flavor violation (MFV) and Froggatt-Nielsen symmetry (FN). The simplest models in either framework predict flavor changing couplings that are too small to be directly observed. Yet, in the MFV framework, it is possible to have le…
We study the relevance of strange degrees of freedom for nucleon structure functions. For this purpose we employ the three flavor generalization of the collective quantization approach to the chiral soliton of the bosonized Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. Contrary to many other soliton models the hadronic tensor is tractable in this model. By applying the Bjorken limit to the hadronic tensor we extract the leading twist contributions to the nucleon structure functions at the low energy scale at which the model is assumed to approximate QCD. After transforming to the infinite momentum frame and perfo…
Spontaneous breaking of inter-family (horizontal) gauge symmetries can be at the origin of the mass hierarchy between the fermion families. The corresponding gauge bosons have flavor-nondiagonal couplings which generically induce the flavour changing phenomena, and this puts strong lower limits on the flavor symmetry breaking scales. However, in the special choices of chiral horizontal symmetries the flavor changing effects can be naturally suppressed. For the sake of demonstration, we consider the case of leptonic gauge symmetry $SU(3)_e$ acting between right-handed leptons and show that the …
I study many higgs doublet supersymmetric model with spontaneous CP violation. The damaging flavor changing interactions and large CP violation are brought under control simultaneously by an approximate PQ symmetry. I relate the smallness of the CP violating parameter in the kaon system to the small ${m_b \over m_t}$ ratio.
This review considers models with extended Higgs sectors in which there are tree-level flavor-changing neutral currents (FCNC) mediated by scalars. After briefly reviewing models without tree-level FCNC, several models with such currents are discussed. A popular mass-matrix ansatz, in which the flavor-changing couplings are the geometric mean of the individual flavor couplings, is presented. While it provided a target for experimentalists for three decades, it in now being severely challenged by experiments. Couplings expected to be of O(1) must be substantially smaller and the ansatz is now n…
A simple calculation in the framework of the chiral quark theory of Manohar and Georgi yields results that can account for many of the ''failures'' of the naive quark model: significant strange quark content in the nucleon as indicated by the value of $σ_{πN},$ the $\overline{u}$-$\overline{d} $ asymmetry in the nucleon as measured by the deviation from Gottfried sum rule and by the Drell-Yan process, as well as the various quark contributions to the nucleon spin as measured by the deep inelastic polarized lepton-nucleon scatterings.
We examine the subprocess $γγ\to t\bar{c}+\bar{t}c$ at electron-positron colliders in the two-Higgs-doublet model with flavor-changing scalar couplings, where all the one-loop contribuions are considered, and the results are applicable to the whole mass range of the weakly coupled Higgs bosons. Because of the heavy top quark mass, this process is important in probing the flavor-changing top-charm-scalar vertex and could be detectable at the Next Linear Collider, if the values of the parameters are favorable. The results show that this process is more promising than the direct $e^{+} e^{-}$ pro…
We consider the phenomenology of a composite technicolor model proposed recently by Georgi. Composite technicolor interactions produce four-quark operators in the low energy theory that contribute to flavor changing neutral current processes. While we expect operators of this type to be induced at the compositeness scale by the flavor-symmetry breaking effects of the preon mass matrices, the Georgi model also includes operators from higher scales that are not GIM-suppressed. Since these operators are potentially large, we study their impact on flavor changing neutral currents and CP violation …
We study a new class of flavor changing interactions, which can arise in models based on extended gauge groups (rank $>$4) when new charged fermions are present together with a new neutral gauge boson. We discuss the cases in which the flavor changing couplings in the new neutral current coupled to the $Z^\prime$ are theoretically expected to be large, implying that the observed suppression of neutral flavor changing transitions must be provided by heavy $Z^\prime$ masses together with small $Z$-$Z^\prime$ mixing angles. Concentrating on E$_6$ models, we show how the tight experimental limit o…
The article reviews the conditions for lepton-flavor conservation in leptonic interactions. The conditions are similar to those developed in the quark sector. For neutrinos the mass eigenstates are unitary superpositions of flavor states which together with small mass differences produce neutrino oscillations. A new property for neutrinos is the fact that their masses are very small suppressing their couplings to neutral scalar fields. The results are demonstrated in several models.
We investigate the potentials of high energy lepton-proton colliders to detect a flavor changing $l-l^{\prime}-Z$ or $l-l^{\prime}-γ$ couplings from the processes $ep\toμ(τ)X$ and $μp\to τX$. For the $l-l^{\prime}-Z$ coupling we consider string inspired $E_6$ model whereas $l-l^{\prime}-γ$ coupling is analyzed in the framework of anomalous magnetic moment type interaction (AMMI) model.
We look for a mechanism that removes without numerical fine tuning the strong constraint imposed by the flavor changing neutral current interaction of leptoquark exchange. If n x n degenerate leptoquarks couple universally to n generations of quarks and leptons in the weak basis, not only can the neutral current interactions be flavor diagonal, but also the charge current interaction takes exactly the same form as W exchange at low energies. Atomic parity violation still imposes tight constraints. Electroweak doublets with some left-right symmetry have the best chance to be the lightest leptoq…
The intrinsic quark-antiquark pairs generated by the minimal energy nonperturbative meson-baryon fluctuations in the nucleon sea provide a consistent framework for understanding a number of empirical anomalies observed in the deep inelastic quark-parton structure of nucleons: the flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea implied by the violation of Gottfried sum rule, the proton spin problem implied by the violation of the Ellis-Jaffe sum rule, and the outstanding conflict between two different determinations of the strange quark sea in the nucleon.
Recent data on the Gottfried sum and less recent ones on the pion-nucleon sigma term seem to disagree with naive parton-based expectations on the light (i.e., up, down and strange) quark content of the nucleon. We show that these discrepancies are resolved if nonperturbative contributions are included in the analysis of the data. These appear both in the computation of matrix elements of operators, and in their QCD scale dependence, and depend strongly on the quantum numbers of the given state.
We study the effects of a set of dimension six flavor changing effective operators on several processes of production of top quarks at the LHC. Namely, top anti-top production and associated production of a top and a gauge or Higgs boson. Analytical expressions for the cross sections of these processes are derived and presented.
Theoretical models which present flavor changing neutrino interactions and simultaneously prevent this particle from acquiring any mass exist. We discuss some of them and their predictions for neutrino oscillations in matter which can account for the solar neutrino anomaly as well as the zenith-angle dependence of the deficit of atmospheric neutrinos observed by the SuperKamiokande experiment without invoking, therefore, neutrino masses nor mixing.
Due to the very large mass of the top-quark, probing the flavor changing top-charm-scalar vertex is clearly very important. Fortunately the largeness of $m_t$ endows a unique signature to the resulting reaction i.e., $e^+e^-\to t\bar c (\bar t c)$ that should be helpful in identification of such events. A two Higgs doublet model, without natural flavor conservation, is used to give an illustrative estimate for the rate for these reactions.
We illustrate the possibility of observing signals from Flavor Changing Neutral Currents, originating from the scalar sector of a Two Higgs Doublet Model. In particular, we focus on the tree level process mu^+ mu^- --> tbar c + cbar t, via scalar exchange in the s-channel, as a distinctive process for mu^+ mu^- colliders.
The subprocess $gg \to t\bar{c}+\bar{t}c$ in the two-Higgs-doublet model with flavor-changing scalar couplings is examined at the one loop level. With perturbative QCD factorization theorem, the corresponding cross sections for hadron-hadron collisions are computed numerically. The results are applicable to the whole mass range of the weakly coupled Higgs bosons. In case we could efficiently exclude the severe backgrounds of the $t\bar{c}(\bar{t}c)$ production signal, probing the flavor-changing top-charm-scalar vertex at hadron colliders would be very promising and accessible experimentally.
The two--loop mechanism of Bjorken and Weinberg is used to constrain flavor changing neutral Higgs bosons. We calculate the complete set of two--loop diagrams for the rare decay $μ\rightarrow e + γ$ induced by such neutral Higgs bosons, for arbitrary Higgs and top masses. The analytic result is used to set limits on Higgs masses for some recent models with specific ansatz about the flavor changing couplings. For example, in the Cheng--Sher scenario of multi-Higgs doublet models, all neutral Higgs bosons possess flavor changing ($f_i \leftrightarrow f_j)$ couplings proportional to $\sqrt{m_i m_…
We give a brief summary of the Gottfried sum rule and a flavor asymmetric distribution $\bar u-\bar d$ in the nucleon. First, experimental history of the sum-rule studies is discussed. Second, future prospects for studying the asymmetry at Fermilab and RHIC are discussed. We also comment on possible nuclear modification.
We calculate the two-loop QCD mixing of the dimension-five flavor-changing operators that arise in the Standard Model after integrating out the $W$, $Z$ and Higgs bosons and the top-quark, i.e.~the mixing among gluonic and photonic magnetic moment operators. Our calculation completes the two-loop anomalous dimension matrix of operators that govern low energy flavor-changing processes. It is an important ingredient of the next-to-leading calculation of the $B \rightarrow X_s γ$ decay rate.
We discuss two topics related to the flavor structure of the nucleon sea. The first is on the identification of light-quark intrinsic sea from the comparison between recent data and the intrinsic sea model by Brodsky et al. Good agreement between the theory and data allows a separation of the intrinsic from the extrinsic sea components. The magnitudes of the up, down, and strange intrinsic seas have been extracted. We then discuss the flavor structure and the Bjorken-x dependence of the connected sea (CS) and disconnected sea (DS). We show that recent data together with input from lattice QCD …
We study the flavor changing neutral current decays of the MSSM Higgs bosons into strange and bottom quarks. We focus on a scenario of minimum flavor violation here, namely only that induced by the CKM matrix. Taking into account constraint from $b\to s γ$, $δρ$ as well as experimental constraints on the MSSM spectrum, we show that the branching ratio of $(Φ\to b\bar{s})$ and $(Φ\to \bar{b}s)$ combined, for $Φ$ being either one of the CP even Higgs states, can reach the order $10^{-4}$-$10^{-3}$ for large $\tanβ$, large $μ$, and large $A_t$. The result illustrates the significance of minimal f…
The flavor changing decay Z -> d_I \bar{d}_J is investigated with special emphasis on the b \bar{s} final state. Various models for flavor violation are considered: two Higgs doublet models (2HDM's), supersymmetry (SUSY) with flavor violation in the up and down-type squark mass matrices and SUSY with flavor violation mediated by R-parity-violating interaction. We find that, within the SUSY scenarios for flavor violation, the branching ratio for the decay Z -> b \bar{s} can reach 10^{-6} for large \tanβvalues, while the typical size for this branching ratio in the 2HDM's considered is about two…
We explore the possibility that the masses for the first two generations of fermions and the quark flavor violation are generated radiatively in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We assume that the source of all flavor violation resides in the the supersymmetry breaking sector and is transmitted radiatively to the Standard Model fermion sector through finite corrections at low energy. The approximate radiative alignment between the Yukawa and soft supersymmetry breaking matrices helps to suppress some of the supersymmetric contributions to flavor changing processes, overcoming current…
Leptonic flavor-changing $H^0$ decays with branching ratios of the order of $10^{-5}-10^{-6}$ may constitute an interesting framework when looking for large $CP$-violating effects. We show that leptonic $CP$~asymmetries of an intermediate $H^0$ boson can be fairly large in natural scenarios of the minimal Standard Model ($SM$) with right-handed neutrinos, at a level that may be probed at future $H^0$~factories.
The flipped trinification, a framework for unifying the 3-3-1 and left-right symmetries, has recently been proposed in order to solve profound questions, the weak parity violation and the number of families, besides the implication for neutrino mass generation and dark matter stability. In this work, we argue that this gauge-completion naturally provides flavor-changing neutral currents in both quark and lepton sectors. The quark flavor changing happens at the tree-level due to the nonuniversal couplings of $Z'_{L,R}$, while the lepton flavor changing $l\rightarrow l'γ$ starts from the one loo…
Aspects of the quark mixings and flavor changing interactions are investigated in electroweak models with singlet quarks. The effects on the ordinary quark mixing are determined in terms of the quark masses and the parameters describing the mixing between the ordinary quarks q and the singlet quarks Q (q-Q mixing). Some salient features arise in the flavor changing interactions through the q-Q mixing. The unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix within the ordinary quark sector is violated, and the flavor changing neutral currents (FCNC's) appear both in the gauge and scalar cou…
We propose several Two Higgs Doublet Models with the addition of an Abelian gauge group which free the usual framework from flavor changing neutral interactions and explain neutrino masses through the seesaw mechanism. We discuss the kinetic and mass-mixing gripping phenomenology which encompass several constraints coming from atomic parity violation, the muon anomalous magnetic moment, rare meson decays, Higgs physics, LEP precision data, neutrino-electron scattering, low energy accelerators and LHC probes.
The SU(3) symmetric chiral quark model, which describes interactions between quarks, gluons and the Goldstone bosons, explains reasonably well many aspects of the flavor and spin structure of the proton, except for the values of $f_3/f_8$ and $Δ_3/Δ_8$. Introducing the SU(3)-breaking effect suggested by the mass difference between the strange and nonstrange quarks, we find that this discrepancy can be removed and better overall agreement obtained.
In the two-Higgs doublet extension of the standard model, flavor-changing neutral couplings arise naturally. In the lepton sector, the largest such coupling is expected to be $μ-τ-ϕ#. We consider the effects of this coupling on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The resulting bound on the coupling, unlike previous bounds, is independent of the value of other unknown couplings. It will be significantly improved by the upcoming E821 experiment at Brookhaven National Lab.
