Minimal Flavor Violation and SU(5)-unification

Minimal Flavour Violation in its strong or weak versions, based on $U(3)^3$ and $U(2)^3$ respectively, allows suitable extensions of the Standard Model at the TeV scale to comply with current flavour constraints in the quark sector. Here we discuss considerations analogous to MFV in the context of $SU(5)$-unification, showing the new effects/constraints that arise both in the quark as in the lepton sector, where quantitative statements can be made controlled by the CKM matrix elements. The case of supersymmetry is examined in detail as a particularly motivated example. Third generation sleptons and neutralinos in the few hundred GeV range are shown to be compatible with current constraints.


Introduction
The discovery of the Higgs boson and the measurement of some of its couplings, together with the number of different flavour measurements performed in the last fifteen years or so, have raised the tests of the Standard Model (SM) to a qualitatively higher level. On one side there is the reported evidence for the linear relation, m i = λ i v, between the masses and the couplings to the Higgs boson of the SM particles (for the moment the heavier ones). On the other side several of the flavour-changing SM loops have been experimentally confirmed with strengths as expected in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) picture of flavor physics. Altogether it is appropriate to say that the ensemble of these tests have turned the Yukawa couplings of the Higgs boson in the SM into an element of physical reality. At the same time this strikingly underlines what is perhaps the major weakness of the SM itself: its inability to predict any of these couplings. This is the current status of the flavour problem in the SM, which strongly motivates the efforts to increase the precision of the mentioned tests, now typically at the 10 ÷ 30% level.
When trying to go beyond the SM, the description of flavour faces a further problem of different nature. If new particles are expected at the TeV scale, the compliance with the flavour tests is highly non trivial. Attempts to achieve it rest on dynamical assumptions, on flavour symmetries or on a combination thereof. Examples of the first kind are gauge or anomaly mediation of supersymmetry breaking, whereas a combinations of symmetries (typically U (1) factors) and dynamics is invoked in models of alignment. Based on symmetries alone, Minimal Flavour Violation (MFV) is the way to make new physics at the TeV scale compatible with flavour tests. By MFV phenomenologically defined we mean here that in an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach the only relevant operators are the ones that correspond to the Flavour Changing Neutral Current effects occurring in the SM, weighted by a common scale and by the standard CKM factors up to (possibly flavour dependent) coefficients of order unity. As briefly recalled in the next Section there exist a strong version of MFV [1][2][3] based on the U (3) 3 flavour group (or equivalent) and a weak version, based on the U (2) 3 flavour group [4,5] (or equivalent).
MFV, as recalled above, refers to the quark sector. Is there something analogous that can be said on the lepton sector, always having in mind new physics not far from the TeV scale? When asking such question, what comes immediately to mind is the issue of neutrino masses, whose nature (Dirac or Majorana) and origin (at low or high energy among other issues) are unknown 1 . This is a difficulty. Perhaps the very small neutrino masses do not influence at all the flavour structure of the charged lepton sector. If so, however, what is left that can possibly constrain it? In the SM, without neutrino masses, one remains with individual lepton number conservation. With extra particles at the TeV scale individual lepton number conservation is unlikely, but, leaving out neutrino masses, one seems to loose any way to argue further in a truly quantitative way.
In this paper we discuss to what extent SU (5) unification can avoid this impasse. By SU (5) unification we simply mean that there exist definite SU (5)-invariant Yukawa couplings that give rise, after symmetry breaking, to realistic quark masses and mixings as well as to the observed charged lepton masses. In the low energy theory this leads both to deviations from MFV in the quark sector and to a definite pattern of flavour violation in the charged lepton sector, always controlled by the CKM matrix elements. The compatibility of such patterns with current bounds will be discussed in general as well as, in particular, considering the possible existence of supersymmetric particles at the TeV scale.

Strong and weak Minimal Flavour Violation
Strong MFV [1][2][3] is obtained by assuming the quark flavour symmetry in the gauge sector of the SM to be as well a symmetry of whatever Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) theory under examination, only broken by the standard Yukawa coupling matrices Y u and Y d in the directions Although this gives up any attempt to understand the pattern of quark masses and mixings, it nevertheless leads to MFV since, by symmetry transformations, Y u and Y d can be reduced as in the SM to the form where Y D u,d are diagonal and V is the CKM matrix. Here with Y u and Y d we denote the low energy Yukawa couplings with canonically normalized quark fields, which in general differ from the original symmetry breaking parameters but have necessarily the same transformation properties under U (3) 3 and can equally well be used to characterize the symmetry breaking in the EFT.
Weak MFV [4,5] is based on the observation that briefly called U (2) 3 , is an approximate symmetry of the quark spectrum and mixings 2 . This suggests to consider U (2) 3 rather then U (3) 3 as the relevant symmetry with U (2) 3 breaking described by small parameters. The only minimal set of spurions that can do this is The smallness of these parameters relates to the smallness of all quark Yukawa couplings except the top one and to the smallness of the elements V td , V ts , V ub , V cb of the CKM matrix. The presence of a doublet, possibly different from V, is necessary to allow the communication between the third and the first two generations. It is simple to convince oneself that any other single doublet transforming differently from V would have to be of order unity, thus strongly breaking U (2) 3 , and would not lead to MFV. The low energy Yukawa couplings acquire the form Here x t,b are order one coefficients and, by symmetry transformations, one can set where is a real parameter, L u,d 12 are rotation matrices in the space of the first two generations with angles θ u,d L and Φ L = diag e −iφ , 1 , i.e. four parameters in total. Due to the smallness of , λ u and λ d , both Y u and Y d are perturbatively diagonalized by pure left transformations, i.e. the products of two successive unitary transformations in the 1 − 2 and 2 − 3 sectors. In turn this gives for the standard CKM matrix

U (3) 2 and SU (5)-unification
In terms of the usual trinification of 10(T ) ⊕5(F ) representations of SU (5), the minimal set of Yukawa couplings for realistic charged fermion masses is We assume that the elements of Y N are small enough not to influence the considerations developed in the following. This is certainly consistent, e.g., if any of the elements of the matrix M is less than 10 11 GeV. As mentioned, we do this to limit the impact of our ignorance on the values of Y N and M separately.
In analogy with strong MFV in the SM, the obvious way to go in the SU (5) case is to consider the symmetry which acts on T andF as T = (3, 1) andF = (1, 3) [12]. Furthermore one assumes that U (3) 2 is only broken in the directions no matter which other operator is present at whatever scale. At the TeV scale, after integrating out all heavy particles and including RGE running effects, the Yukawa Lagrangian, written in conventional notation, takes the form where h is the only light Higgs doublet and the multiplets Q, u, d, e, each with a flavour index and canonically normalized kinetic terms, have definite transformation properties under as do the low energy Yukawa matrices λ u,d,e The matrices λ u,d,e control at the same time the flavour symmetry properties of every other higher dimensional operator left understood in (3.4). This is because they are in the same number as the original "spurions" Y u , Y 1 , Y 2 , with the same transformation properties up to a complex conjugation. For example it is where the a n are complex coefficients of order unity or smaller and we neglect terms involving where V is again the CKM matrix. On the contrary λ e has the form where V eF , V eT are fixed unknown unitary matrices.

U (3) 2 and Lepton Flavour Violation
The presence of two spurions λ T d and λ e with the same transformations properties under U (3) 2 , one of which dependent on unknown mixing matrices, is the source of potentially large deviations from MFV, particularly from chirality-breaking down-quark operators. If compared with the current bounds, an even stronger direct constraint arises from Lepton Flavour Violation (LFV) and, more specifically, from the µ → e + γ transition.
The relevant operator is c which, in terms of the physical charged leptons (kept denoted in the same way), becomes For µ → e + γ the likely dominant term is the one proportional to the mass of the b-quark which leads to a transition rate From the current bound on the Branching Ratio of 5.7 · 10 −13 [13] and using m b (3 TeV) = 2.4 GeV, one gets (3.14) Even taking into account a possible loop suppression factor, this is a strong constraint, far beyond the typical MFV bounds. As mentioned a somewhat weaker but still significant constraint on the misalignment of the λ d and λ e matrices arises from the consideration of chirality breaking ∆B or ∆S transitions. Although still highly significant, the constraint in (3.14) can be made weaker by a factor m b /m s ≈ 50 if one assumes that all the elements of Y 2 in eq. (3.1) are at most of order m s , which is sufficient to cure the mass relation problem of the single T Y 1F H5 coupling.

U (2) 2 and SU (5)-unification
The starting point is again the SU (5)-invariant Yukawa Lagrangian With respect to U (2) 2 it is In analogy with the U (3) 2 discussion, the low energy Lagrangian in this case assumes the form 3 with self-evident transformation properties under U (2) 2 of the various fields/spurions. By these same transformations one can set V, λ u and λ d as (see eq. (2.6)) and λ e to the form where U eF , U eT are fixed unknown 2 × 2 unitary matrices. In 3 × 3 flavour space the low energy Yukawa matrices are given by Altogether this means that to a sufficient approximation the low energy Yukawa matrices are diagonalized by the unitary 3 × 3 matrices with U 23 ( ) a unitary transformation of order in the 2 − 3 sector. U u , U d are the same diagonalization matrices as in normal U (2) 3 , with their parameters determined as in (2.8, 2.9), except that in U (2) 3 case the matrix U u acts only on the left side of Y D u . Before going further, let us note that U (2) 2 , unlike U (3) 2 , makes natural room for the successful relations m b ≈ m τ and m µ ≈ 3m s , valid at unification. This only requires that ∆ 1 be sufficiently smaller than ∆ 2 not to undo the last relation arising from the coupling to H 45 . At the same time ∆ 1 must be capable to give the proper relation between m e and m d . We assume in the following that all the elements of ∆ 1 are at most of the order needed to this purpose. This in turn implies that the relative alignment between the λ d and λ T e matrices is, without any further assumption or tuning, of order m d /m s both on the left and on the right side.

U (2) 2 and LFV
In analogy with the discussion in the U (3) 2 case, the presence of two spurions with the same transformation properties in the down and charged lepton sectors is a source of potentially large flavour violations. In the U (2) 2 case, however, there are two significant differences. As just said, in 1 − 2 flavour space λ d and λ T e are misaligned only by relative rotations of order m d /m s . Furthermore, due to the small U (2) 2 breaking, the diagonalization of both Y d and Y e in 2 − 3 flavour space is obtained by small rotations of the same order .
Here again the leading constraint comes for the µ → eγ transition. The relevant operator is only acting in 1 − 2 flavour space. Therefore, after going to the physical basis, one obtains a transition rate where this time A, B are the misalignment matrices between λ e and λ T D in the 1 − 2 sector, of order m d /m s . One gets therefore the bound (4.12) to be compared with the bound in eq. (3.14). This is still a significant limit, but now a loop suppression factor of about 10 −3 , as illustrated below in a specific example, could be consistent with new particles of TeV mass.

Electric Dipole Moments
In U (2) 3 (as in U (3) 3 ) one expects EDMs for the quarks, most significantly the ones of the first generation that contribute to the neutron EDM. If one includes also the electron EDM, the relevant operators are 4 c EDM e m e Λ 2 eF µν (ē L σ µν e R ), with c EDM e,u,d generally complex in the physical basis. From the current bounds on the electron and neutron EDMs, respectively d e < 8.7 · 10 −29 e · cm [14] and d n < 2.9 · 10 −26 e · cm [15], one gets the corresponding limits on the imaginary parts of these coefficients [16,17] |Im(c EDM d )| 5.6 · 10 −3 Λ 3 TeV whereas the dipole of the down quark receives negligible corrections. For the electron the additional contribution comes from the same type of operator as in eq. (4.10), whereas for the up-quark it is due to the fact that in U (2) 2 both Q L and u R transform under the same U (2) group factor or, differently stated, that the diagonalization matrix U u is present on both sides of Y D u in eq. (4.8). Barring cancellations this gives the limits (4.16)

U (2) 2 and Quark Flavour Violation
The counterpart in the down-quark sector of the chirality breaking effect in µ → eγ of Sec. 4.1 is due to the operator By a similar line of reasoning to the one that leads to the limit in eq. (4.12) and following the analyses of [19,20], the effect of this operator on the parameter sets the bound |c ∆S=1 || sin φ| 6 · 10 −2 Λ 3 TeV Following [20,21], the current limit on direct CP violation in D → ππ, KK decays gives the bound (4.20) Before closing this Section we summarize in Table 1 the bounds on the coefficients of the different operators normalized to a scale Λ = 3 TeV. The bounds on Im(c EDM e ) and Im(c EDM u ) are 8 · 10 −5 and 1.2 · 10 −2 respectively. The bounds on the coefficients of the other FCNC operators are at the typical 10 −1 ÷ 10 −2 level [5,11], depending on their phases, and are the same in U (2) 2 or U (3) 2 .

U (2) 2 in supersymmetry
The picture that emerges from the previous Sections is that U (2) 2 gives rise to several new effects than the ones normally considered in MFV, with the relevant feature, as in MFV, that their flavour structure, both in the quark and, more interestingly, in the charged lepton sector, is always controlled by the CKM matrix elements. It is this feature that allows to make quantitative considerations 5 . There are two good reasons that make it relevant to see the impact of the above considerations in the special case of supersymmetry. First of all is the obvious connection of supersymmetry with gauge coupling unification. Not less important, however, is the consideration of the bounds in Table 1. Unless the various coefficients include a loop suppression factor, as in the case of supersymmetry, one can interpret them as quite strong lower bounds on the scale Λ, much above the few TeV range. In turn this appears in contrast with our original motivation of understanding the compliance with the flavour constraints of new particles with masses in the TeV range.
The model we consider is a generic supersymmetric SU (5)-theory with a Yukawa superpotential that gives rise to L U (2) Y as in eq. (4.1) and with soft supersymmetry breaking terms generated by supergravity. In the flavour sector the entire theory is invariant under U (2) 2 as in eq.s (4.2) and (4.3). On this basis we shall consider the low energy theory in two different ways. We implement the general case as discussed above or we take universal A-terms at least when restricted to the 1 − 2 sector. At low energy flavour changing effects are present in the Yukawa couplings, in the A-terms and in the squared masses for squarks and leptons. The Yukawa couplings Y u,d,e , with the usual meaning of the angle β, take the form of eq. (4.7). The A-terms have an analogous structure and where the various a-factors are mass terms of similar order of magnitude, related to the low energy scale of effective supersymmetry breaking. Finally the squared masses have two different forms. Up to negligibly small terms quadratic in λ e,d,u , the squared masses forL andd R are diagonal and degenerate in 1 − 2 sector, whereas the mass terms forẽ R ,ũ R and Q have contributions controlled by the spurion V, i.e.
and similar for M 2 Q , M 2 u .

µ → e + γ
To discuss µ → eγ it is convenient to go to the basis where Y e and M 2 e , M 2 L are diagonal, i.e. the physical basis for the charged leptons but not for the sleptons, since A e is still non diagonal. In this basis both the bino, χ, and the neutral higgsino have flavour changing interactions with the (e R ,ẽ R ) multiplets On the contrary, in the general case in which both λ e and λ T d are present, it is the last one that dominates. Therefore, in this case it is where on both sides of the diagonal term there appear two unitary 1 − 2 transformations of order m d /m s , representing precisely the misalignment of λ T d with λ e . The diagrams that contribute to µ → eγ are shown in Fig.s 1. Based on eq.s (5.6) and (5.7) (with A-terms universal) the only flavour changing matrix present in these interactions is U e . As such, a GIM-like cancellation takes place, controlled by the non degeneracy of the charged sleptons, of relative order unity between the third and the first two generations and of relative order 2 within the first two generations. As a consequence the µ → eγ amplitude receives contributions proportional to m µ U * e (µτ )U e (eτ ) (a 1 − 2/3 effect) or to m µ 2 U * e (µµ)U e (eµ) (a 1 − 2 effect), both equal to m µ V * ts V td up to a factor of order unity. In the case of general A eterm the presence of the misalignment matrices in eq. (5.8) inhibits the GIM-like cancellation Representative values for the size of these effects, taken incoherently, and normalized to the current limit, BR(µ → eγ) < 5.3 · 10 −13 [13], are shown in Fig. 2,3 both for general and universal A e -term. Consistently with this bound, the largest possible value of BR(τ → µγ) can be reached with a universal A e -term, at 10 −9 level. One should remember the order one unknown factor in front of each of these amplitudes.

Electron EDM
As seen in Table 1, the electron EDM is potentially capable of providing the strongest limit, although generally dependent on more than one unknown phase. In supersymmetry a well known effect that arises from interactions not included in eq.s (5.1) or (5.2), since it is not related to flavour changing phenomena, is due to a chargino-sneutrino one loop diagram. From the current experimental limit [15] and |M χ | = |µ| on obtains the bound on the mass of the sneutrino of the first generation [23] mν > 17 TeV · (sin φ µ tan β) 1/2 (5.9) The interactions in eq.s (5.1) or (5.2) also contribute to the electron EDM by diagrams analogous to the ones in Fig. 1, again with a distinction between universal or non universal A e -term. Representative values for the size of these effects are shown in Fig. 4,5 for maximal values of the relevant phases and some choice of the other parameters, as indicated.

Summary and conclusions
The effort to increase the precision of current flavour tests of the SM, now at the 10 ÷ 30% level, is a strongly motivated task of particle physics in itself. At the same time this effort could give indirect signals of the existence of new particle at the TeV scale, complementary to the potentiality of their direct search in high energy collisions. Although not exclusively, nevertheless a strong basis for this statement is the possibility that MFV be at work in some extension of the SM. Especially in its weak form, based on the U (2) 3 flavour group, phenomenological MFV can explain the absence of new signals so far, while making plausible their emergence in foreseen flavour physics experiments.     Im a e1 1 TeV Figure 5. As in Fig. 4 with universal A-terms for tan β = 1 (left) and tan β = 7 (right).
While MFV has a predictive content in the quark sector, this is relatively less the case when one tries to extend it to the lepton sector, due to the uncertainties related to the description of neutrino masses. To overcome this problem here we have proposed a predictive scheme based on extending MFV considerations to SU (5)-unification. As far as the quark sector is concerned, weak MFV can be made consistent with SU (5)-unification without introducing new strong constraints, even though some interesting CP-violating effects appear both through ∆S = 1 and ∆C = 1 chirality breaking operators. In the charged lepton sector, on the other hand, one predicts flavour violations with intensities also controlled, to a good approximation, by the CKM mixing angles. From a general EFT point of view Table 1 is an effective summary of our findings. As shown there, not unexpectedly, the current limits on µ → eγ as on the electron EDM represent strong constraints.
Although not exclusively, supersymmetry is the obvious arena where these considerations might be of relevance. For this reason we have considered their implementation in a realistic supersymmetric SU (5)-theory with soft supersymmetry breaking terms generated by supergravity. Without any extra assumption µ → eγ and the electron EDM with maximal CP-violating phases require charged sleptons of the first two generations in the 1 ÷ 3 TeV range, as shown in Fig.s 2 and 4 . Sleptons of the first two generations in the few hundred GeV range can be made compatible with the flavor scheme proposed here provided the Aterms are universal and the CP-violating phases contributing to the electron EDM are not maximal. Third generation sleptons and neutralinos in the few hundred GeV range are in any case consistent with present bounds. This is illustrated in Fig.s 3 and 5. The weaker bound on the mass of the third generation leptons comes from the fact that in any event the communication between them and the first two lepton generations is controlled by the small CKM matrix elements.