Systematic classification of three-loop realizations of the Weinberg operator

TL;DR

This paper systematically classifies three-loop realizations of the Weinberg operator, identifying genuine models that produce neutrino masses without lower order contributions, and provides a framework for constructing such models.

Contribution

It identifies 73 genuine three-loop topologies leading to neutrino masses, classifies them, and offers a method to analyze their diagrams and models.

Findings

73 genuine three-loop topologies identified

Generated 374 diagrams reduced to 30 in mass basis

Concrete models with numerical neutrino mass estimates provided

Abstract

We study systematically the decomposition of the Weinberg operator at three-loop order. There are more than four thousand connected topologies. However, the vast majority of these are infinite corrections to lower order neutrino mass diagrams and only a very small percentage yields models for which the three-loop diagrams are the leading order contribution to the neutrino mass matrix. We identify 73 topologies that can lead to genuine three-loop models with fermions and scalars, i.e. models for which lower order diagrams are automatically absent without the need to invoke additional symmetries. The 73 genuine topologies can be divided into two sub-classes: Normal genuine ones (44 cases) and special genuine topologies (29 cases). The latter are a special class of topologies, which can lead to genuine diagrams only for very specific choices of fields. The genuine topologies generate 374 diagrams in the weak basis, which can be reduced to only 30 distinct diagrams in the mass eigenstate basis. We also discuss how all the mass eigenstate diagrams can be described in terms of only five master integrals. We present some concrete models and for two of them we give numerical estimates for the typical size of neutrino masses they generate. Our results can be readily applied to construct other $d=5$ neutrino mass models with three loops.