Group space scan of flavor symmetries for nearly tribimaximal lepton mixing

TL;DR

This paper systematically explores discrete Abelian flavor symmetries to model nearly tribimaximal lepton mixing, predicting small reactor angles and deriving testable relations for future neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive group space scan identifying models that produce realistic lepton mixing patterns with specific predictions for neutrino angles.

Findings

Several thousand models fit current neutrino data

Derived a new relation  for reactor angle

Established a sum rule for atmospheric angle 

Abstract

We present a systematic group space scan of discrete Abelian flavor symmetries for lepton mass models that produce nearly tribimaximal lepton mixing. In our models, small neutrino masses are generated by the type-I seesaw mechanism. The lepton mass matrices emerge from higher-dimension operators via the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism and are predicted as powers of a single expansion parameter \epsilon that is of the order of the Cabibbo angle \theta_C\simeq 0.2. We focus on solutions that can give close to tribimaximal lepton mixing with a very small reactor angle \theta_{13}\approx 0 and find several thousand explicit such models that provide an excellent fit to current neutrino data. The models are rather general in the sense that large leptonic mixings can come from the charged leptons and/or neutrinos. Moreover, in the neutrino sector, both left- and right-handed neutrinos can mix maximally. We also find a new relation \theta_{13}\lesssim\epsilon^3 for the reactor angle and a new sum rule \theta_{23}\approx\pi/4+\epsilon/\sqrt{2} for the atmospheric angle, allowing the models to be tested in future neutrino oscillation experiments.