Flavour in intersecting brane models and bounds on the string scale

We study flavour issues in non-supersymmetric intersecting brane models. Specifically, the purpose of the present paper is twofold: (i) to determine whether realistic flavour structures can be obtained in these models, and (ii) to establish whether the non-supersymmetric models address the gauge hierarchy problem. To this end, we find that realistic flavour structures, although absent at tree level, can arise even in the simplest models after effects of 4 fermion instanton-induced operators and radiative corrections have been taken into account. On the other hand, our analysis of flavour changing neutral currents (FCNC), electric dipole moments (EDM), supernova SN1987A and other constraints shows that the string scale has to be rather high, 10(4) TeV. This implies that non-supersymmetric intersecting brane models face a severe finetuning problem. Finally, we comment on how non-trivial flavour structures can arise in supersymmetric models. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.