Christopher Smith
Abstract
The unification of the quark and charged lepton flavor structures is revisited using the tools of Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV). Under that framework, we first identify a unique point in parameter space where flavor universality is maximally violated. Though from the point of view of the usual polynomial MFV expansions, standing close to that point would require unacceptable fine-tunings, it is automatically attained with infinite geometric MFV series. Remarkably, this peculiar point is precisely where the charged lepton Yukawa coupling can be expressed naturally in terms of those of the quarks. The most striking consequence would be that the physical electron field is dominantly the gauge lepton field of the third generation.