A See-Saw Mechanism with light sterile neutrinos

Abstract

The usual see-saw mechanism for the generation of light neutrino masses is based on the assumption that all of the flavours of right-handed (more properly, sterile) neutrinos are heavy. If the sterile Majorana mass matrix is singular, one or more of the sterile neutrinos will have zero mass before mixing with the active (left-handed) neutrinos and be light after that mixing is introduced. In particular, a rank 1 sterile mass matrix leads naturally to two pseudo-Dirac pairs, one very light active Majorana neutrino and one heavy sterile Majorana neutrino. For any pattern of Dirac masses, there exists a region of parameter space in which the two pseudo-Dirac pairs are nearly degenerate in mass. This, in turn, leads to large amplitude mixing of active states as well as mixing into sterile states.