Less Minimal Flavour Violation
Dr. David Straub (SNS, Pisa)

While the gauge hierarchy problem suggests the presence of new physics around the TeV scale, bounds from flavour physics require much larger scales if flavour violation is generic. This tension could be resolved if the new physics is approximately invariant under a suitable flavour symmetry. Indeed, the quark sector of the Standard Model exhibits an approximate U(2)^3 flavour symmetry under which the first two generations transform as doublets and the third generation as singlets. In this talk I discuss the consequences of assuming this symmetry to be approximately respected by new physics in a general effective field theory framework, as well as in the two most popular solutions to the gauge hierarchy problem: supersymmetry and models with a composite Higgs boson.