Non-Abelian flavor symmetry and R parity

Abstract

If R-parity violation turns out to be a true aspect of nature, speculation about its possible origin could add a new dimension to the supersymmetric flavor problem. It has been shown in the past by Barbieri, Hall, and their collaborators that the small breaking parameters of an approximate non-Abelian flavor symmetry could govern the light quark and lepton masses and at the same time could account for the near degeneracies of squarks and sleptons. A possible connection of the above feature to the natural suppressions of R parity-violating couplings has been investigated here. With some modifications of the approximate flavor symmetry, a supersymmetric theory without R parity has been motivated that has testable experimental signatures.