HIERARCHY OF QUARK MASSES, CABIBBO ANGLES AND CP VIOLATION

Some ideas are put forward towards understanding the fact that mass ratios of quarks or leptons are usually rather large. These speculations are based on the assumption that the basic (bare) couplings at small distances are all of the same order of magnitude but otherwise unknown or random. The most promising explanation requires the bare left- and right-handed components of a quark to have different values for some almost conserved quantum number. These differences determine the order of magnitude of the corresponding quark mass. The generalized Cabibbo mixing angle connecting two types of quarks is then predicted to be given order of magnitude wise by the square root of the corresponding quark mass ratio. However, it is difficult to understand why CP is so well conserved. © 1979.