Neutrino Flavor Model Building and the Origins of Flavor and CP Violation: A Snowmass White Paper

TL;DR

This white paper reviews recent progress in neutrino flavor model building using non-Abelian discrete and modular symmetries, aiming to understand neutrino masses, mixing, and CP violation, and connect to fundamental theories.

Contribution

It highlights the development of flavor models with reduced parameters and discusses their potential to interpret experimental data and link to string theory.

Findings

Models with non-Abelian discrete symmetries reduce parameter space.

Modular symmetries offer a promising framework for flavor modeling.

These models can interpret current and future neutrino data.

Abstract

The neutrino sector offers one of the most sensitive probes of new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The mechanism of neutrino mass generation is still unknown. The observed suppression of neutrino masses hints at a large scale, conceivably of the order of the scale of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT), a unique feature of neutrinos that is not shared by the charged fermions. The origin of neutrino masses and mixing is part of the outstanding puzzle of fermion masses and mixings, which is not explained in the SM. Flavor model building for both quark and lepton sectors is important in order to gain a better understanding of the origin of the structure of mass hierarchy and flavor mixing, which constitute the dominant fraction of the SM parameters. Recent activities in neutrino flavor model building based on non-Abelian discrete flavor symmetries and modular flavor symmetries have been shown to be a promising direction to explore. The emerging models provide a framework that has a significantly reduced number of undetermined parameters in the flavor sector. Model building based on non-Abelian discrete flavor symmetries and their modular variants enables the particle physics community to interpret the current and anticipated upcoming data from neutrino experiments. Pursuit of flavor model building based on such frameworks can also provide connections to possible UV completions, in particular to string theory. We emphasize the importance of constructing models in which the uncertainties of theoretical predictions are smaller than, or at most compatible with, the error bars of measurements in neutrino experiments.