Universally enhanced light-quarks Yukawa couplings paradigm

We propose that natural TeV-scale new physics (NP) with O(1) couplings to the standard model (SM) quarks may lead to a universal enhancement of the Yukawa couplings of all the light quarks, perhaps to a size comparable to that of the SM b-quark Yukawa coupling, i.e., yq~O(ybSM) for $q=u$, d, c, s. This scenario is described within an effective field theory (EFT) extension of the SM, for which a potential contribution of certain dimension six effective operators to the light quark Yukawa couplings is yq~O(fv²Λ²), where v is the Higgs vacuum expectation value, v=246 GeV, Λ is the typical scale of the underlying heavy NP, and f is the corresponding Wilson coefficient which depends on its properties and details. In particular, we study the case of yq~0.025~ybSM, which is the typical size of the enhanced light-quark Yukawa couplings if the NP scale is around Λ~1.5 TeV and the NP couplings are natural, i.e., f~O(1). We also explore this enhanced light quark Yukawa paradigm in extensions of the SM which contain TeV-scale vectorlike quarks, and we match them to the specific higher dimensional effective operators in the EFT description. We discuss the constraints on this scenario and the flavor structure of the underlying NP dynamics and suggest some resulting ``smoking gun'' signals that should be searched for at the LHC, such as multi-Higgs production pp→hh,hhh and single Higgs production in association with a high pT jet (j) or photon pp→hj,hγ and with a single top-quark pp→ht.