Dispersive constraints on fermion masses

Abstract

We demonstrate that fermion masses in the Standard Model (SM) can be constrained by the dispersion relations obeyed by hadronic and semileptonic decay widths of a fictitious heavy quark $Q$ with an arbitrary mass. These relations, imposing stringent connections between the high-mass and low-mass behaviors of decay widths, correlate a heavy quark mass and the chiral symmetry breaking scale. Given the known input from leading-order heavy quark expansion and a hadronic threshold for decay products, we solve for a physical heavy quark decay width. It is shown that the charm (bottom) quark mass $m_c= 1.35$ GeV ($m_b= 4.0$ GeV) can be determined by the dispersion relation for the $Q\to du\bar d$ ($Q\to c\bar ud$) decay with the threshold $2m_\pi$ ($m_\pi+m_D$), where $m_\pi$ ($m_D$) denotes the pion ($D$ meson) mass. Requiring that the dispersion relation for the $Q\to su\bar d$ ($Q\to d\mu^+\nu_\mu$, $Q\to u\tau^-\bar\nu_\tau$) decay with the threshold $m_\pi+m_K$ ($m_\pi+m_\mu$, $m_\pi+m_\tau$) yields the same heavy quark mass, $m_K$ being the kaon mass, we constrain the strange quark (muon, $\tau$ lepton) mass to be $m_s= 0.12$ GeV ($m_\mu=0.11$ GeV, $m_\tau= 2.0$ GeV). Moreover, all the predicted decay widths corresponding to the above masses agree with the data. It is pointed out that our formalism is similar to QCD sum rules for probing resonance properties, and that the Pauli interference (weak annihilation) provides the higher-power effect necessary for establishing the solutions of the hadronic (semilaptonic) decay widths. This work suggests that the parameters in the SM may not be free, but arranged properly to achieve internal dynamical consistency.