Hierarchical chiral symmetry breaking and quark mass matrices revisited

We demonstrate how the assumption of hierarchical chiral symmetry breaking can be systematically used to create phenomenologically satisfactory mass matrices. In place of postulating a particular set of mass matrices at the outset, we emphasize that once a particular basis for the first stage of chiral symmetry breaking is selected, the following steps are determined by the known information on quark masses and mixings. We illustrate this procedure for the basis originally chosen by Fritzsch and find a modified set of quark mass matrices, corresponding to equal final-stage non-diagonal radiative contributions, which fits the data much better in the minimal Higgs framework, provided mt≅88 GeV and the mixing ratio vertical strokeVubvertical stroke/vertical strokeVcbvertical stroke≅0.15. (orig.)