A NEW SUPERSYMMETRIC FRAMEWORK FOR FERMION MASSES

Supersymmetric theories involving a spontaneously broken flavor symmet ry can solve the flavor-changing problem while having quark and lepton masses derived from both F and D terms. As an example, a theory of le ptons is constructed in which holomorphy constrains the electron to be massless at tree level. The electron flavor symmetries are broken by D terms, leading to flavor mixing in the slepton mass matrices, which allows a radiative electron mass to be generated by the gauge interact ions of supersymmetric QED. Such a radiative origin for the electron m ass can be probed by searches for tau --> e gamma, and could be verifi ed or eliminated by measurements of slepton pair production.