The breaking of flavor democracy in the quark sector

The democracy of quark flavors is a well-motivated flavor symmetry, but it must be properly broken in order to explain the observed quark mass spectrum and flavor mixing pattern. We reconstruct the texture of flavor democracy breaking and evaluate its strength in a novel way, by assuming a parallelism between the Q = +2/3 and Q = -1/3 quark sectors and using a nontrivial parametrization of the flavor mixing matrix.Some phenomenological implications of such democratic quark mass matrices, including their variations in the hierarchy basis and their evolution from the electroweak scale to a super-high energy scale, are also discussed. (authors)