Bounds on flavor gauge bosons from precision electroweak data - art. no. 035009

Gauged flavor symmetries at low energies have been proposed in models of dy namical electroweak symmetry breaking and fermion mass generation. The mass ive flavor gauge bosons give rise to corrections to precisely measured elec troweak quantities. We perform a fit to the collider electroweak data and p lace indirect limits on such new physics. In particular we study several mo dels from the literature: universal coloron, chiral top color, chiral quark family symmetry, SU(9) and SU(12) chiral flavor symmetry. The 95% exclusio n limits on the mass of the heavy gauge bosons for these models, at their c ritical coupling for chiral symmetry breaking, typically lie between 1 and 3 TeV. We discuss the robustness of these bounds with respect to changes in Higgs boson mass, b-quark asymmetry data, the SLD left right asymmetry dat a, or additional new physics.