Can the Large Hadron Collider explain the masses and mixings of the known fermions? A promising possibility is that these masses and mixings are determined by flavor symmetries that also govern new particles that will appear at the LHC. We consider well-motivated examples in supersymmetry with both gravity and gauge mediation. Contrary to spreading belief, new physics need not be minimally flavor violating. We build nonminimally flavor violating models that successfully explain all known lepton masses and mixings, but span a wide range in their predictions for slepton flavor violation. In natural and favorable cases, these models have metastable sleptons and are characterized by fully reconstructible events. We outline many flavor measurements that are then possible and describe their prospects for resolving both the standard model and new physics flavor puzzles at the Large Hadron Collider. © 2008 The American Physical Society.

We propose a method for determining the mass difference between two particles, l

Flavor physics may help us understand theories beyond the standard model. In the context of supersymmetry, if we can measure the masses and mixings of sleptons and squarks, we may learn something about supersymmetry and supersymmetry breaking. Here we consider a hybrid gauge-gravity supersymmetric model in which the observed masses and mixings of the standard model leptons are explained by a U(1)×U(1) flavor symmetry. In the supersymmetric sector, the charged sleptons have reasonably large flavor mixings, and the lightest is metastable. As a result, supersymmetric events are characterized not by missing energy, but by heavy metastable charged particles. Many supersymmetric events are therefore fully reconstructible, and we can reconstruct most of the charged sleptons by working up the long supersymmetric decay chains. We obtain promising results for both masses and mixings, and conclude that, given a favorable model, precise measurements at the LHC may help shed light not only on new physics, but also on the standard model flavor parameters.