QUARK FLAVOR CONSERVING VIOLATIONS OF THE LEPTON NUMBER

We study super-symmetric models of lepton and baryon number violation based on an abelian family gauge group. Due to possible lepton-Higgs m ixing, the lepton violating couplings are related to the Yukawa coupli ngs and may be generated by them even if they were absent in the origi nal theory. Such terms may be dominant and are not given by the naive family charge counting rules, This enhancement mechanism can provide a n alignment between lepton-number violating terms and Yukawa couplings : as a result they conserve quark flavour. A natural way of suppressin g baryon number violation in this class of models is also proposed. (C ) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.