Minimal complete tri-hypercharge theories of flavour

Abstract The tri-hypercharge proposal introduces a separate gauged weak hypercharge assigned to each fermion family as the origin of flavour. This is arguably one of the simplest setups for building “gauge non-universal theories of flavour” or “flavour deconstructed theories”. In this paper we propose and study two minimal but ultraviolet complete and renormalisable tri-hypercharge models. We show that both models, which differ only by the heavy messengers that complete the effective theory, are able to explain the observed patterns of fermion masses and mixings (including neutrinos) with all fundamental coefficients being of O $$ \mathcal{O} $$ (1). In fact, both models translate the complicated flavour structure of the Standard Model into three simple physical scales above electroweak symmetry breaking, completely correlated with each other, that carry meaningful phenomenology. In particular, the heavy messenger sector determines the origin and size of fermion mixing, which controls the size and nature of the flavour-violating currents mediated by the two heavy Z′ gauge bosons of the theory. The phenomenological implications of the two minimal models are compared. In both models the lightest Z′ remains discoverable in dilepton searches at the LHC Run 3.