A light scalar as the messenger of electroweak and flavor symmetry breaking

Understand

We propose a new framework for understanding the hierarchies of fermion masses and mixings.

• The masses and mixings of all Standard Model (SM) charged fermions other than top arise from higher dimensional operators involving a messenger scalar S and flavon scalars F_i.
• The flavons spontaneously break SM flavor symmetries at around the TeV scale.
• The SM singlet scalar S couples directly to the Higgs H and spontaneously breaks another U(1) at the electroweak scale.