Intuitive

Concrete

• Original Paper: Quark masses and Cabibbo angles by Haim Harari et. al.
• Essential Review: Mass and flavor mixing schemes of quarks and leptons by Harald Fritzsch, Zhi-zhong Xing

Abstract

Important Papers

• Flavour democracy and the lepton-quark hierarchy by H. Fritzsch and J.Plankl
• H. Harari, H. Haut and J. Weyers, Phys. Letl. B 78 (1978) 459;
• Y. Chikashige, G. Gelmini, R.D. Pcccei and M. Roncadelli, Phys. Lett. B 94 (1980) 499.
• C. Jarlskog, in: Proc. Intern. Conf. on Production and decay of heavy hadrons (Heidelberg, 1986).
• Y. Koide, Phys. Rev. D 28 (1983) 252; Phys. Left. B 120 (1983) 16l; preprints US-89-01 (1989), US-89-07 (1989).
• H. Fritzsch, preprint MPI-PAE 22/88 ( 1988); Proc. XI. Warsaw Symp. on High energy physics (Kazimierz, Poland, 1988); preprint MP1-PAE/PTh 26/89.
• L. Laoura, Phys. Lett. B 228 (1989) 245.
• C.H. Albright and M. Lindner, preprint, FERMILAB-PUB-89/17 T

Possible Origins of the Democratic Yukawa Matrices

• Specific breaking of chiral symmetries
• BCS like "pairing forces", see also this paper by Nambu and especially the papers by Meshkov and Kaus.
• Radiative corrections involving heavy fermions

Why is it interesting?

Flavor democracy is one of the most attractive approaches to explain the observed mass and mixing angles pattern of the standard model.

It was already noted in 1978 that a Yukawa matrix where all entries are the same, i.e. democratic, yields one important aspect of the flavor puzzle automatically: the heaviness of the third generation. In addition, adding a small perturbation to this democratic ansatz yields successfull relations between the masses and mixing angles.

In addition, there is a close relationship to the (in)famous Koide formula and other popular solutions of the flavor problem, called Fritzsch textures.

History

The notion "democratic family mixing" was introduced by C. Jarlskog in University of Stockholm Report No. 10, 1986