General Analysis of Phases in Quark Mass Matrices

We give a detailed discussion of our general determination of (i) the number of unremovable, physically meaningful phases in quark mass matrices and (ii) which elements of these matrices can be rendered real by rephasings of fermion fields. The results are applied to several currently viable models. New results are presented for an arbitrary number of fermion generations; these provide further insight into the three-generation case of physical interest.