Past exam of the particle physics course of the University of Oxford / 2017 / 6 / c / Solution

The weak charged current couples an up-type quark to the rotated down field $d_{iL}^{\prime }={\sum }_j{V}_{ij}{d}_{jL}$. A neutral current is flavour universal within equal-charge quarks. Rotating it into the mass basis therefore givesThe off-diagonal terms vanish by CKM unitarity, so no tree-level flavour-changing neutral current is generated. In the two-generation description, the orthogonal strange-charm partner completes the rotation whose single down-strange combination alone would have produced an off-diagonal neutral coupling. The complete multiplet supplies the cancellation.

At loop level, a flavour-changing amplitude has the structureIf all internal masses were equal, $F$ would be common and ${\sum }_i{V}_{ai}{V}_{bi}^{\ast }=0$. Subtracting an arbitrary common value makes the suppression explicit:This is the Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani mechanism. Unequal masses leave small loop-level flavour-changing neutral currents, so the statement that they are never observed would be too strong: the mechanism suppresses them and forbids them at tree level. The cancellation requires complex CKM products; the rounded table of absolute values alone must not be summed as if every phase were positive.