Friedberg-Lee symmetry and tribimaximal neutrino mixing in the inverse seesaw mechanism

Abstract

The inverse seesaw mechanism with three pairs of gauge-singlet neutrinos offers a natural interpretation of the tiny masses of three active neutrinos at the TeV scale. We combine this picture with the newly proposed Friedberg-Lee (FL) symmetry in order to understand the observed pattern of neutrino mixing. We show that the FL symmetry requires only two pairs of the gauge-singlet neutrinos to be massive, implying that one active neutrino must be massless. We propose a phenomenological ansatz with broken FL symmetry and exact μ-τ symmetry in the gauge-singlet neutrino sector, and obtain the tribimaximal neutrino mixing pattern by means of the inverse seesaw relation. We demonstrate that nonunitary corrections to this result can possibly reach the percent level, and a soft breaking of μ-τ symmetry can give rise to CP violation in such a TeV-scale seesaw scenario. © 2009 The American Physical Society.