Several popular Ansätze of lepton mass matrices that contain texture zeros are confronted with current neutrino observational data. We perform a systematic χ 2 -analysis in a wide class of schemes, considering arbitrary Hermitian charged lepton mass matrices and symmetric mass matrices for Majorana neutrinos or Hermitian mass matrices for Dirac neutrinos. Our study reveals that several patterns are still consistent with all the observations at 68.27% confidence level, while some others are disfavored or excluded by the experimental data. The well-known Frampton-Glashow-Marfatia two-zero textures, hybrid textures and parallel structures, among others, are considered.

We look for minimal chiral sets of fermions beyond the standard model that are anomaly free and, simultaneously, vectorlike particles with respect to colour SU(3) and electromagnetic U(1). We then study whether the addition of such particles to the standard model particle content allows for the unification of gauge couplings at a high energy scale, above $5.0 \times 10^{15}$ GeV so as to be safely consistent with proton decay bounds. The possibility to have unification at the string scale is also considered. Inspired in grand unified theories, we also search for minimal chiral fermion sets that belong to SU(5) multiplets. Restricting to representations up to dimension 50, we show that some of these sets can lead to gauge unification at the GUT and/or string scales.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables; Comments and references added, final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

We look for predictive flavour patterns of the effective Majorana neutrino mass matrix that are compatible with current neutrino oscillation data. Our search is based on the assumption that the neutrino mass matrix contains equal elements and a minimal number of parameters, in the flavour basis where the charged lepton mass matrix is diagonal and real. Three unique patterns that can successfully explain neutrino observables at the 3 σ confidence level with just three physical parameters are presented. Neutrino textures described by four and five parameters are also studied. The predictions for the lightest neutrino mass, the effective mass parameter in neutrinoless double beta decays and for the CP-violating phases in the leptonic mixing are given.

Adding right-handed neutrino singlets and/or fermion triplets to the particle content of the standard model allows for the implementation of the seesaw mechanism to give mass to neutrinos and, simultaneously, for the construction of anomaly-free gauge group extensions of the theory. We consider Abelian extensions based on an extra Uð1Þ X gauge symmetry, where X is an arbitrary linear combination of the baryon number B and the individual lepton numbers L e;; . By requiring cancellation of gauge anomalies, we perform a detailed analysis in order to identify the charge assignments under the new gauge symmetry that lead to neutrino phenomenology compatible with current experiments. In particular, we study how the new symmetry can constrain the flavor structure of the Majorana neutrino mass matrix, leading to twozero textures with a minimal extra fermion and scalar content. The possibility of distinguishing different gauge symmetries and seesaw realizations at colliders is also briefly discussed.