Physics Letters B (Jun 2024)
Flavor invariance of leptonic Yukawa terms in the 3HDM
Abstract
As an extension of the Standard Model (SM), the 3HDM (Three-Higgs-Doublet Model) defines additional relationships among the fermions. In the visible leptonic Yukawa sector of the 3HDM, we investigate the existence of flavor symmetries under discrete non-abelian groups up to order 1032. When the VEVs are not allowed to depart from their alignment imposed by the condition of minimal potential in the Higgs scalar sector, there will be severe mass degeneracies and a lack of lepton flavor mixing for any nontrivial flavor group. Yet we propose to study the Yukawa terms of the lepton sector for in case the VEV alignment would not be protected, hence leaving the VEV ratios as free parameters. Then, as it turns out, mass splitting for the charged leptons and the neutrinos is obtained although it is still impossible to obtain correct fits to the experimentally known lepton mass spectrum and to the PMNS matrix simultaneously.