Kahler corrections and softly broken family symmetries

Abstract

Spontaneously broken family symmetry provides a promising origin for the observed quark and lepton mass and mixing angle structure. In a supersymmetric theory such structure comes from a combination of the contributions from the superpotential and the Kähler potential. The superpotential effects have been widely studied but relatively little attention has been given to the effects of the Kähler sector. In this paper we develop techniques to simplify the analysis of such Kähler effects. Using them we show that in the class of theories with an hierarchical structure for the Yukawa couplings the Kähler corrections to both the masses and mixing angles are subdominant. This is true even in cases that texture zeros are filled in by the terms coming from the Kähler potential.