General Issues Connecting Flavor Symmetry and Supersymmetry

Abstract

We motivate and construct supersymmetric theories with continuous flavor symmetry, under which the electroweak Higgs doublets transform non-trivially. Flavor symmetry is spontaneously broken at a large mass scale in a sector of gauge-singlet fields; the light Higgs multiplets naturally emerge as special linear combinations that avoid acquiring the generic large mass. Couplings of the light Higgs doublets to light moduli fields from the singlet sector could lead to important effects in the phenomenology of the Higgs sector.