Possible reason why leptons are lighter than quarks

The minimal model of spontaneously broken leptonic colour and discrete quark-lepton symmetry predicts that charged leptons have the same masses as their partner charge $+2/3$ quarks up to small radiative corrections. By invoking a different pattern of symmetry breaking, a similar model can be constructed with the structural feature that charged leptons have to be lighter than their partner quarks because of mixing between leptonic colours, provided mixing between generations is not too strong. As well as furnishing a new model-building tool, this is phenomenologically interesting because some of the new physics responsible for the quark-lepton mass hierarchy could exist on scales as low as several hundred GeV.