Neutrino mass and grand unification of flavor

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel approach within SO(10) grand unification to simultaneously explain the distinct mass and mixing patterns of quarks and neutrinos, addressing a longstanding puzzle in particle physics.

Contribution

It proposes a new ansatz and demonstrates its realization within an SO(10) framework to unify quark and lepton flavor hierarchies.

Findings

Provides a viable SO(10) model for flavor unification.

Offers insights into the differences between quark and neutrino mixing.

Suggests a pathway for understanding physics beyond the Standard Model.

Abstract

The problem of understanding quark mass and mixing hierarchies has been an outstanding problem of particle physics for a long time. The discovery of neutrino masses in the past decade, exhibiting mixing and mass patterns so very different from the quark sector has added an extra dimension to this puzzle. This is specially difficult to understand within the framework of conventional grand unified theories which are supposed to unify the quarks and leptons at short distance scales. In the paper, I discuss a recent proposal by Dutta, Mimura and this author that appears to provide a promising way to resolve this puzzle. After stating the ansatz, we show how it can be realized within a SO(10) grand unification framework. Just as Gell-Mann's suggestion of SU(3) symmetry as a way to understand the hadronic flavor puzzle of the sixties led to the foundation of modern particle physics, one could hope that a satisfactory resolution of the current quark-lepton flavor problem would provide fundamental insight into the nature of physics beyond the standard model.