Less minimal flavour violation

We consider the approximate U(2)3 flavour symmetry exhibited by the quark sector of the Standard Model and all its possible breaking terms appearing in the quark Yukawa couplings. Taking an Effective Field Theory point of view, we determine the current bounds on these parameters, assumed to control the breaking of flavour in a generic extension of the Standard Model at a reference scale Λ. In particular, a significant bound from ϵ′/ϵ is derived, which is relevant to Minimal Flavour Violation as well. In the up- quark sector, the recently observed CP violation in D → π+π−, K+K− decays might be accounted for in this generic framework, consistently with any other constraint.