A New Approach to Yukawa Textures in Supersymmetric Unified Models With Gauged Family Symmetries

The origin of texture zeroes in the Yukawa matrices may be accounted for by appealing to a broken gauged family symmetry such as U(1)_X, where such symmetries arise naturally from string theories. In order to improve the predictive power of such models we appeal to quark-lepton unification where additional Clebsch texture zeroes appear, leading to an entirely new class of models. We illustrate these ideas in the context of the Pati-Salam gauge group SU(4)xSU(2)_LxSU(2)_R supplemented by a U(1)_X gauged family symmetry. The gauge symmetries are broken down to those of the minimal supersymmetric standard model which is the effective theory below 10^16 GeV. The combination of the U(1)_X family symmetry and the Pati-Salam gauge group leads to a successful and predictive set of Yukawa textures involving both kinds of texture zeroes. We discuss both symmetric and non-symmetric textures in models of this kind, and in the second case perform a detailed numerical fit to the charged fermion mass and mixing data. Two of the Yukawa textures allow a low energy fit to the data with a total chi^2 of 0.39 and 1.02 respectively, for three degrees of freedom.