Flavor Symmetries: Finding tests and alternatives

by Dr Heinrich Paes (University of Dortmund)

Tuesday Feb 19, 2013, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM Pacific/Honolulu

420 (Watanabe Hall)

Strategies to solve the flavor puzzle range from symmetries up to anarchy. However, flavor symmetries provide a huge variety of models with predictions spanning a large part of the parameter space. Thus the search for both tests of flavor symmetry models as well as alternatives is unavoidable. In this talk I first discuss a test of flavor symmetry: Enlarged Higgs sectors typically lead to exotic Higgs decays observable at the LHC. Next I provide an alternative for flavor models: the approximate tri-bi-maximal structure of leptonic mixing is excellently fit by assuming right-handed neutrinos to be closed strings with masses being dominated by knots and links.