Abstract: The framed standard model (FSM) is obtained from the standard model by incorporating, as field variables, the frame vectors (vielbeins) in internal symmetry space. It gives the standard Higgs boson and 3 generations of quarks and leptons as immediate consequences. It gives moreover a fermion mass matrix of the form: m = mT alpha alpha dagger, where alpha is a vector in generation space independent of the fermion species and rotating with changing scale, which has already been shown to lead, generically, to up-down mixing, neutrino oscillations and mass hierarchy. In this paper, pushing the FSM further, one first derives to 1-loop order the RGE for the rotation of alpha, and then applies it to fit mass and mixing data as a first test of the model. With 7 real adjustable parameters, 18 measured quantities are fitted, most (12) to within experimental error or to better than 0.5 percent, and the rest (6) not far off. (A summary of this fit can be found in Table 2 of this paper.) Two notable features, both generic to FSM, not just specific to the fit, are: (i) that a theta-angle of order unity in the instanton term in QCD would translate via rotation into a Kobayashi-Maskawa phase in the CKM matrix of about the observed magnitude (J similar to 10(-5)), (ii) that it would come out correctly that m(u) < m(d), despite the fact that m(t) >> m(b), m(c) >> m(s). Of the 18 quantities fitted, 12 are deemed independent in the usual formulation of the standard model. In fact, the fit gives a total of 17 independent parameters of the standard model, but 5 of these have not been measured by experiment.

Abstract: The framed standard model (FSM) suggested earlier, which incorporates the Higgs field and three fermion generations as part of the framed gauge theory (FGT) structure, is here developed further to show that it gives both quarks and leptons hierarchical masses and mixing matrices akin to what is experimentally observed. Among its many distinguishing features which lead to the above results are (i) the vacuum is degenerate under a global su(3) symmetry which plays the role of fermion generations, (ii) the fermion mass matrix is “universal,” rank-one and rotates (changes its orientation in generation space) with changing scale mu, (iii) the metric in generation space is scale-dependent too, and in general nonflat, (iv) the theta-angle term in the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) action of topological origin gets transformed into the CP-violating phase of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix for quarks, thus offering at the same time a solution to the strong CP problem.

Abstract: A summary of recent precise results in tau and charm physics is presented. Topics include leptonic and hadronic tau decays, lepton flavour and lepton number violation, charm mixing and CP violation, leptonic and semileptonic charm decays, rare decays and spectroscopy.