Aspects of Neutrino Masses and Lepton-Number Violation in the light of the Super-Kamiokande data

Abstract

We discuss aspects of neutrino masses and lepton-number violation, in the light of the observations of Super-Kamiokande. As a first step, we use the data from various experiments, in order to obtain a phenomenological understanding of neutrino mass textures. We then investigate how the required patterns of neutrino masses and mixings are related to the flavour structure of the underlying theory. In supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, renormalisation group effects can have important implications: for small tanb, bottom-tau unification indicates the presence of significant muon-tau flavour mixing. The evolution of the neutrino mixing may be described by simple semi-analytic expressions, which confirm that, for large tanb, very small mixing at the GUT scale may be amplified to maximal mixing at low energies, and vice versa. Passing to specific models, we first discuss the predictions for neutrino masses in different GUT models (including superstring-embedded solutions). Imposing the requirement for successful leptogenesis may give additional constraints on the generic structure of the neutrino mass textures. Finally, we discuss direct ways to look for lepton-number violation in ultra-high energy neutrino interactions.