Towards a new paradigm for quark-lepton unification.

The quark and charged lepton mass patterns upset their naïve unification. In this paper, a new approach to solve this problem is proposed. Model-independently, we find that a successful unification can be achieved. A mechanism is identified by which the large top quark mass renders its third-generation leptonic partner very light. This state is thus identified with the electron. We then construct a toy model to implement dynamically this mechanism, using tree-level exchanges of vector leptons to relate the quark and charged lepton flavor structures. In a supersymmetric context, this same mechanism splits the squark masses, and third generation squarks end up much lighter than the others. Finally, the implementation of this mechanism in SU(5) GUT permits to avoid introducing any flavor structure beyond the two minimal Yukawa couplings, ensuring the absence of unknown mixing matrices and their potentially large impact on FCNC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]