Neutrino mass and grand unification of flavor

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.

Invited plenary talk at the symposium honoring Prof. Murray Gell-Mann on his 80th Birthday; Nanyang techinical University, Singapore, February, 2010; 15 pages, no figures

References in corpus (14)

• Neutrino tri-bi-maximal mixing from a non-Abelian discrete family symmetry
• Tri-Bimaximal Neutrino Mixing and the Family Symmetry Z_7 x Z_3
• Is S4 the horizontal symmetry of tri-bimaximal lepton mixing?
• Lepton Mixing and Cancellation of the Dirac Mass Hierarchy in SO(10) GUTs with Flavor Symmetries T7 and Sigma(81)
• An SO(10) GUT Model with $S4$ Flavor Symmetry
• Large hierarchies from approximate R symmetries
• A new family symmetry for SO(10) GUTs
• Fermion Masses and Flavor Mixings in a Model with $S_4$ Flavor Symmetry
• A Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory of Flavour with PSL(2,7) x SO(10)
• An A4 model for lepton masses and mixings
• Origin of Quark-Lepton Flavor in SO(10) with Type II Seesaw
• Intermediate left-right gauge symmetry, unification of couplings and fermion masses in SUSY $SO(10)\times S_4$
• Tri-bi-maximal mixing in viable family symmetry unified model with extended seesaw
• Geometric Mean Neutrino Mass Relation

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Cancellation Mechanism of FCNCs in S_4 x Z_2 Flavor Symmetric Extra U(1) Model
• A Model of Four Generation Fermions and Cold Dark Matter and Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry
• MSSM-like from $S{U}_5\times D_4$ Models