Neutrino Yukawa Textures within Type-I Seesaw

Abstract

We review neutrino Yukawa textures with zeros within the framework of the type-I seesaw with three heavy right chiral neutrinos and in the basis where the latter and the charged leptons are mass diagonal. An assumed nonvanishing mass of every ultralight neutrino and the observed nondecoupling of any neutrino generation allow a maximum of four zeros in the Yukawa coupling matrix in family space. We show that the requirement of an exact μt symmetry, coupled with the observational constraints, reduces seventy-two allowed such textures to only four corresponding to just two different forms of the light neutrino mass matrix: one with an inverted and the other with a normal mass ordering. The masses and Majorana phases of ultralight neutrinos are predicted within definite ranges with laboratory and cosmological observational inputs. Within the same framework, we also study Yukawa textures with a fewer number of zeros, but with exact μt symmetry. We further formulate the detailed scheme of the explicit breaking of μt symmetry in terms of three small parameters for allowed four zero textures. The observed sizable mixing between the first and third generations of neutrinos is shown to follow for a suitable choice of these symmetry breaking parameters.