Parity and the origin of neutrino mass

Abstract

In the LHC era the issue of the origin and nature of neutrino mass has attained a new meaning and a renewed importance. The growing success of the Higgs–Weinberg mechanism behind the charged fermion masses paves the way for answering the question of neutrino mass. We have shown recently how the spontaneous breaking of parity in the context of the minimal left–right symmetric model allows to probe the origin of neutrino mass in complete analogy with the charged fermions masses in the Standard Model. We revisit here this issue and fill in the gaps left in our previous work. In particular we discuss a number of different mathematical approaches to the problem of disentangling the seesaw mechanism and show how a unique analytical solution emerges. Most important, we give all the possible expressions for the neutrino Dirac mass matrix for general values of light and heavy neutrino mass matrices. In practical terms what is achieved is an untangling of the seesaw mechanism with clear and precise predictions testable at hadron colliders such as LHC.