Flavor Beyond the Standard Universe

Abstract

We explore the possibility that the observed pattern of quark masses is the consequence of a statistical distribution of Yukawa couplings within the multiverse. We employ the anthropic condition that only two ultra light quarks exist, justifying the observed richness of organic chemistry. Moreover, the mass of the recently discovered Higgs boson suggests that the top Yukawa coupling lies near the critical condition where the electroweak vacuum becomes unstable, leading to a new kind of flavor puzzle and to a new anthropic condition. We scan Yukawa couplings according to distributions motivated by high-scale flavor dynamics and find cases in which our pattern of quark masses has a plausible probability within the multiverse. Finally we show that, under some assumptions, these distributions can significantly ameliorate the runaway behavior leading to weakless universes.