Flavor Democracy: On which basis?

Abstract

I argue that flavor democracy should not be considered as a "mere" assumption, but rather a fact that is inherent where there is hierarchy of quark masses. Briefly the crux of the argument is the ambiguity of defining a basis when one introduces a mass matrix. That is there is a degree of freedom of also defining a basis other than the weak eigenbasis with respect to which one can write down mass matrices. Since the ultimate aim is to diagonalize to the mass eigenbasis this is physically equivalent. But not necessarily so for the human eye.