Gauged SO(3) family symmetry and squark mass degeneracy
  It is shown that a gauged SO(3) family symmetry can suppress flavor-changing processes from squark-mass non-degeneracy to an acceptable level. The potentially dangerous SO(3) D-terms can be rendered harmless if the CP-violating phases appearing in the SO(3)-breaking sector are small, which can naturally be the case if CP is a spontaneously broken symmetry. This approach has certain advantages over models based on global or non-abelian discrete symmetries, and dovetails with some recent proposals for explaining the pattern of quark and lepton masses. Moreover this approach relates the near-degeneracy of the squark masses to an approximate CP invariance which can also explain the smallness of the electron and neutron electric dipole moments. 
K.S. Babu (Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study) and S.M. Barr   (Bartol Research Institute, Delaware)