Yukawa alignment from natural flavor conservation

Abstract

We study the charged Higgs couplings to fermions in the "democratic" three-Higgs-doublet model, in which one doublet couples to down-type quarks, one to up-type quarks, and one to charged leptons. Flavor-changing neutral Higgs couplings are absent because the Glashow-Weinberg-Paschos condition for natural flavor conservation is in effect. We show that this model reproduces the coupling structure of the charged Higgs boson in the recently-proposed Yukawa-aligned two-Higgs-doublet model, with two subtle constraints that arise from the unitarity of the charged Higgs mixing matrix. Adding a fourth Higgs doublet with no couplings to fermions eliminates these constraints.

Comments: 12 pages, no figures. v2: minor improvements to text, references added, submitted to PRD. v3: added appendix on 3HDM scalar potential, accepted by PRD