Eur. Phys. J. C (2019) 79:903
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7440-x
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Scotogenic cobimaximal Dirac neutrino mixing from (27) and
U (1)
χ
Ernest Ma
a
Physics and Astronomy Department, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
Received: 23 August 2019 / Accepted: 25 October 2019 / Published online: 8 November 2019
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract In the context of SU(3)
C
× SU(2)
L
×U (1)
Y
×
U (1)
χ
, where U (1)
χ
comes from SO(10) → SU(5) ×
U (1)
χ
, supplemented by the non-Abelian discrete (27)
symmetry for three lepton families, Dirac neutrino masses
and their mixing are radiatively generated through dark mat-
ter. The gauge U (1)
χ
symmetry is broken spontaneously. The
discrete (27) symmetry is broken softly and spontaneously.
Together, they result in two residual symmetries, a global
U (1)
L
lepton number and a dark symmetry, which may be
Z
2
, Z
3
,orU(1)
D
depending on what scalar breaks U (1)
χ
.
Cobimaximal neutrino mixing, i.e. θ
13
= 0, θ
23
= π/4, and
δ
CP
=±π/2, may also be obtained.
1 Introduction
Whereas there exist powerful theoretical arguments that neu-
trinos are Majorana, there is yet no incontrovertible experi-
mental evidence that they are so, i.e. no definitive measure-
ment of a nonzero neutrinoless double beta decay [1], with
the best present experimental upper limit [2]ontheMajo-
rana electron neutrino mass in the range 61 to 165 meV. To
make a case for neutrinos to be Dirac, the existence of a right-
handed neutrino ν
R
must be justified, which is of course not
required in the standard model (SM) of quarks and leptons.
The canonical choice is to extend the SM gauge symme-
try SU(3)
C
× SU(2)
L
× U (1)
Y
to the left-right symmetry
SU(3)
C
×SU(2)
L
×SU(2)
R
×U (1)
(B−L)/2
[3]. In that case,
the SU(2)
R
doublet (ν, e)
R
is required, and the charged W
±
R
gauge boson is predicted along with a neutral Z
gauge boson.
A more recent choice is to consider U (1)
χ
which comes
from SO(10) → SU(5) × U (1)
χ
, with SU(5) breaking to
the SM at the same grand unified scale. Assuming that U (1)
χ
survives to an intermediate scale, the current experimental
bound on the mass of Z
χ
being about 4.1 TeV [4,5], then
ν
R
must exist for the cancellation of gauge anomalies. Now
a
e-mail: ma@phyun8.ucr.edu
ν
R
is a singlet and W
±
R
is not predicted. In this context, new
insights into dark matter [6,7] and Dirac neutrino masses
[8,9] have emerged. In particular, the breaking pattern was
fully discussed in Ref. [6].
To make sure that ν
R
itself does not have a Majorana mass,
the breaking of U (1)
χ
should not come from a scalar which
couples to ν
R
ν
R
. This simple idea was first discussed [10]in
2013 in the case of singlet fermions charged under a gauge
U (1)
X
. If the latter is broken by a scalar with three units of
X charge, it is impossible for these fermions with one unit
of X charge to acquire Majorana masses. Hence the residual
symmetry is global U(1) in this case. It is straightforward then
to apply this idea to lepton number [11]. Another possible
residual lepton symmetry is Z
4
which was first pointed out
in Ref. [12].
A second issue regarding Dirac neutrinos is that the cor-
responding Yukawa couplings linking ν
L
to ν
R
through the
SM Higgs boson must be very small. To avoid these tree-
level couplings, it is often assumed that some additional sym-
metry exists which forbids these dimension-four couplings,
but Dirac neutrino masses may be generated radiatively as
this symmetry is broken softly by dimension-three terms.
For a generic discussion, see Ref. [13], which is patterned
after that for Majorana neutrinos [14]. In some applications
[15–17], the particles in the loop belong to the dark sector.
This is called the scotogenic mechanism, from the Greek
‘scotos’ meaning darkness, the original one-loop example
[18] of which was applied to Majorana neutrinos.
Instead of the ad hoc extra symmetry which forbids the
tree-level couplings, exotic assignments of the gauge charges
of ν
R
maybeused[11,19–25] instead. However, a much
more efficacious idea is to use a non-Abelian discrete fam-
ily symmetry, which is softly broken in the dark sector. In
this paper, (27) [26–30] is shown to be useful in achieving
the goal of having scotogenic Dirac neutrino masses with
a mixing pattern [31–33] called cobimaximal [34–39], i.e.
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