Study of the simplest realistic Higgs sector in quark-lepton symmetric models

A discrete symmetry between quarks and (generalized) leptons can exist in nature, and its spontaneous symmetry breaking scale can be as low as a few TeV. Such a discrete symmetry also has interesting implications for how electroweak symmetry is spontaneously broken, because the simplest version of the theory requires two electroweak Higgs doublets rather than one in order to provide acceptable values for quark and lepton masses. The effective theory generated at electroweak-scale energies is thus a particular type of two-Higgs-doublet model. We point out in this paper that the broken discrete symmetry imposes very interesting constraints on the form of the Yukawa couplings between physical Higgs bosons and quarks and leptons. In particular, we find that the flavor-changing neutral Higgs couplings to down-sector quarks are proportional to the neutrino Dirac mass matrix. If neutrinos are Dirac particles, then the severe experimental upper bounds on their mass values renders tree-level neutral flavor-changing Higgs effects on down-quark systems such as $K^0-{\overline{K}}^0$ negligibly small. We also discuss minimization of some relevant Higgs potentials and some other pertinent phenomenological issues.