Flavor physics in the Randall-Sundrum model I. Theoretical setup and electroweak precision tests

A complete discussion of tree-level flavor-changing effects in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model with brane-localized Higgs sector and bulk gauge and matter fields is presented. The bulk equations of motion for the gauge and fermion fields, supplemented by boundary conditions taking into account the couplings to the Higgs sector, are solved exactly. For gauge fields the Kaluza-Klein (KK) decomposition is performed in a covariant R. gauge. For fermions the mixing between different generations is included in a completely general way. The hierarchies observed in the fermion spectrum and the quark mixing matrix are explained naturally in terms of anarchic five-dimensional Yukawa matrices and wave-function overlap integrals. Detailed studies of the flavor-changing couplings of the Higgs boson and of gauge bosons and their KK excitations are performed, including in particular the couplings of the standard W+/- and Z(0) bosons. A careful analysis of electroweak precision observables including the S and T parameters and the Z(0)b (b) over bar couplings shows that the simplest RS model containing only Standard Model particles and their KK excitations is consistent with all experimental bounds for a KK scale as low as a few TeV, if one allows for a heavy Higgs boson (m(h) less than or similar to 1 TeV) and/or for an ultra-violet cut-toff below the Planck scale. The study of flavor-changing effects includes analyses of the non-unitarity of the quark mixing matrix, anomalous right-handed couplings of the W+/- bosons, tree-level flavor-changing neutral current couplings of the Z(0) and Higgs bosons, the rare decays t --> c(u) Z(0) and t --> c(u) h, and the flavor mixing among KK fermions. The results obtained in this work form the basis for general calculations of flavor-changing processes in the RS model and its extensions.