Flavor changing neutral currents in the Lee–Wick Standard Model

Abstract

Recently an extension of the Standard Model (the Lee–Wick Standard Model) based on ideas of Lee and Wick (LW) was introduced. It does not contain quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass and hence solves the hierarchy puzzle. The LW Standard Model contains new heavy LW-resonances at the TeV scale that decay to ordinary particles. In this Letter we examine in more detail the flavor structure of the theory. We integrate out the heavy LW-fermions at tree level and find that this induces flavor changing Z-boson couplings. However, these flavor changing neutral currents are acceptably small since they are automatically suppressed by small Yukawa couplings. This is the case even though the theory does not satisfy the principle of minimal flavor violation. New couplings of the charged W-bosons to quarks and leptons are also induced. We also integrate out the LW–Higgs and examine the four-fermion operators induced.