On stringy origin of minimal flavor violation

We study the minimal flavor violation in the context of string effective field theory. Stringy selection rules indicate that n-point couplings among fermionic zero-modes and lightest scalar modes in the string effective action are given by a product of Yukawa couplings which are regarded as spurion fields of stringy and geometrical symmetries. Hence, Yukawa couplings determine the dynamics of flavor and CP violations. This observation strongly supports the hypothesis of minimal flavor violation in the Standard Model effective field theory.

Freezing In with lepton flavored fermions

Dark, chiral fermions carrying lepton flavor quantum numbers are natural candidates for freeze-in. Small couplings with the Standard Model fermions of the order of lepton Yukawas are `automatic' in the limit of Minimal Flavor Violation. In the absence of total lepton number violating interactions, particles with certain representations under the flavor group remain absolutely stable. For masses in the GeV-TeV range, the simplest model with three flavors, leads to signals at future direct detection experiments like DARWIN. Interestingly, freeze-in with a smaller flavor group such as SU(2) is already being probed by XENON1T.

The flavor of UV physics

New physics not far above the TeV scale should leave a pattern of virtual effects in observables at lower energies. What do these effects tell us about the flavor structure of a UV theory? Within the framework of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), we resolve the flavor structure of the Wilson coefficients in a combined analysis of top-quark and B-physics observables. We assume that the Yukawa couplings are the only sources of flavor symmetry breaking, a framework known as Minimal Flavor Violation. Our fits to LHC and b-factory measurements show that combining top and bottom observables is crucial to pin down possible sources of flavor breaking in a UV theory. This analysis includes the full analytic expansion of SMEFT coefficients in Minimal Flavor Violation and a detailed study of SMEFT effects in b → s flavor transitions.

Positivity bounds on Minimal Flavor Violation

From general analyticity and unitarity requirements on the UV theory, positivity bounds on the Wilson coefficients of the dimension-8 operators composed of 4 fermions and two derivatives appearing in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory have been derived recently. We explore the fate of these bounds in the context of models endowed with a Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV) structure, models in which the flavor structure of higher dimensional operators is inherited from the one already contained in the Yukawa sector of the Standard Model Lagrangian. Our goal is to check whether the general positivity bounds translate onto bounds on the Yukawa coefficients and/or on elements of the CKM matrix. MFV fixes the coefficients of dimension-8 operators up to some multiplicative flavor-blind factors and we find that, in the most generic setup, the freedom left by those unspecified coefficients is enough as not to constrain the parameters of the renormalizable Yukawa sector. On the contrary, the latter shape the allowed region for the former. Requiring said overall coefficients to take natural $$ \mathcal{O}(1) $$ O 1 values could give rise to bounds on the Yukawa couplings. Remarkably, at leading order in an expansion in powers of the Yukawa matrices, no bounds on the CKM entries can be retrieved.

Higgs decay to fermion pairs at NLO in SMEFT

The calculation of next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative corrections at fixed operator dimension in Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) has been a topic of much recent interest. In this paper we obtain the NLO corrections from dimension-6 operators to the Higgs boson decays $$ h\to f\overline{f} $$ h → f f ¯ , where the fermions f ∈ {μ, τ, c}. This extends previous results for $$ h\to b\overline{b} $$ h → b b ¯ to all phenomenologically relevant Higgs boson decays into fermions, and provides the basis for future precision analyses of these decays within effective field theory. We point out the benefits of studying ratios of decay rates into different fermions in SMEFT, the most surprising of which is enhanced sensitivity to anomalous hγγ and hgg couplings induced by flavor-universal SMEFT operators, especially in scenarios where flavor-dependent Wilson coefficients are constrained by Minimal Flavor Violation.