Neutrino mass hierarchy and the origin of leptonic flavor mixing from the right-handed sector

Abstract

We consider a neutrino mass model where all leptonic mixing is induced by a heavy Majorana sector through the seesaw type I mechanism, while the Dirac mass matrices are diagonal. Such a pattern occurs naturally in grand unified theories. Constraints on the parameters of the models are considered and it is shown that a normal neutrino mass hierarchy is preferred. The lightest neutrino mass is typically small, leading to nonobservable rates for neutrinoless double beta decay in the normal hierarchy case.