Flavor Symmetries and the Description of Flavor Mixing

It is shown that the hierarchical structure of the quark mass terms in the standard model suggests a new description of the flavor mixing. The latter is primarily a heavy quark mixing involving the t and b quarks, followed by a mixing exclusively in the u-channel or the d-channel. The complex phase describing CP violation arises only in the light quark sector. The Cabibbo angle is not a basic parameter, but results as a superposition of both the u-channel and d-channel mixing terms. The new description has a number of significant advantages in comparison with all descriptions previously used. It is suggested that the new description be used in all future discussions of flavor physics and CP violation.