DEVELOPING THE FRAMED STANDARD MODEL

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 μ, (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.