Horizontal symmetries for the supersymmetric flavor problem Original Research Article

The heaviness of the third-family fermions and the experimental absence of large flavor-violating processes suggest, in supersymmetric theories, that the three families belong to a 2+1 representation of a horizontal symmetry GH. In this framework, we discuss a class of models, based on the group U(2), that describe the flavor structure of the fermion masses and are compatible with an underlying GUT. We study the phenomenology of these models and focus on two interesting scenarios: In the first one, the first- and second-family scalars are assumed to be heavier than the weak scale, allowing for complex soft supersymmetry-breaking terms. In the second one, all the CP-violating phases are assumed to be small. Both scenarios present a rich phenomenology in agreement with constraints from flavor-violating processes and electric dipole moments.