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Description
Are quarks and leptons elementary, or could they—and perhaps even the Higgs—be bound states of more fundamental constituents? In this talk, we investigate this possibility in a renormalizable preon model based on a confining SU(15) chiral gauge theory. We focus on how the observed pattern of fermion masses and mixing can emerge in this framework. A simple hierarchy in two flavor-breaking couplings reproduces all six quark masses, the charged-lepton masses, and the CKM matrix with order-one nonperturbative parameters. These same couplings also induce rare flavor- and CP-violating processes, providing experimental probes of the model even when the compositeness scale lies well beyond collider reach. We examine the most sensitive observables, including the electron electric dipole moment, neutral-meson mixing, and charged-lepton flavor violation, and compare their sensitivity to the compositeness scale with that of proton-decay searches.