The Seesaw Mechanism in Quark-Lepton Complementarity

TL;DR

This paper systematically explores the landscape of mass matrices in the type-I seesaw mechanism under quark-lepton complementarity assumptions, identifying a large set of viable textures consistent with current data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of 1981 viable Yukawa textures derived from generic assumptions, expanding beyond common special cases in the literature.

Findings

Most right-handed neutrino spectra are only mildly hierarchical.

Special cases like symmetric Dirac matrices are rare among viable textures.

A large set of textures can fit current fermion mass and mixing data.

Abstract

We systematically construct realistic mass matrices for the type-I seesaw mechanism out of more than 20 trillion possibilities. We use only very generic assumptions from extended quark-lepton complementarity, i.e., the leptonic mixing angles between flavor and mass eigenstates are either maximal, or parameterized by a single small quantity epsilon that is of the order of the Cabibbo angle epsilon theta_C. The small quantity epsilon also describes all fermion mass hierarchies. We show that special cases often considered in the literature, such as having a symmetric Dirac mass matrix or small mixing among charged leptons, constitute only a tiny fraction of our possibilities. Moreover, we find that in most cases the spectrum of right-handed neutrino masses is only mildly hierarchical. As a result, we provide for the charged leptons and neutrinos a selected list of 1981 qualitatively different Yukawa coupling matrices (or textures) that are parameterized by the Cabibbo angle and allow for a perfect fit to current data. In addition, we also briefly show how the textures could be generated in explicit models from flavor symmetries.