Towards identifying the minimal flavor symmetry behind neutrino oscillations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the minimal flavor symmetry responsible for neutrino oscillations, linking observed mixing patterns to underlying symmetries, and derives new constraints on lepton-flavor-violating decays.

Contribution

It identifies a minimal flavor symmetry that explains neutrino mixing patterns and extends it to the seesaw mechanism, deriving new bounds on flavor-violating decay processes.

Findings

The effective Majorana neutrino mass term is invariant under specific flavor transformations.

The $R$-matrix for heavy Majorana neutrinos satisfies a symmetry relation $|R_{\mu i}|=|R_{\tau i}|$.

A new upper bound on the decay mode $\tau^- \to e^- + \gamma$ is established, three orders of magnitude more stringent.

Abstract

Current neutrino oscillation data indicate that the $3\times 3$ Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix $U$ exhibits a $\mu$-$\tau$ flavor interchange symmetry $|U^{}_{\mu i}| = |U^{}_{\tau i}|$ (for $i = 1, 2, 3$) as a good approximation. In particular, the T2K measurement implies that the maximal neutrino mixing angle $\theta^{}_{23}$ and the CP-violating phase $\delta$ should be close to $\pi/4$ and $-\pi/2$, respectively. Behind these observations lies a minimal flavor symmetry -- - the effective Majorana neutrino mass term keeps invariant under the transformations $\nu^{}_{e \rm L} \to (\nu^{}_{e \rm L})^c$, $\nu^{}_{\mu \rm L} \to (\nu^{}_{\tau \rm L})^c$ and $\nu^{}_{\tau \rm L} \to (\nu^{}_{\mu \rm L})^c$. Extending this flavor symmetry to the canonical seesaw mechanism, we find that the $R$-matrix describing the strength of weak charged-current interactions of heavy Majorana neutrinos satisfies $|R^{}_{\mu i}| = |R^{}_{\tau i}|$ as a consequence of $|U^{}_{\mu i}| = |U^{}_{\tau i}|$. This result can be used to set a new upper bound, which is about three orders of magnitude more stringent than before, on the flavor mixing factor associated with the charged-lepton-flavor-violating decay mode $\tau^- \to e^- + \gamma$.