On the potential of leptonic Minimal Flavour Violation

Minimal Flavour Violation can be realised in several ways in the lepton sector due to the possibility of Majorana neutrino mass terms. We derive the scalar potential for the fields whose background values are the Yukawa couplings, for the simplest See-Saw model with just two right-handed neutrinos, and explore its minima. The Majorana character plays a distinctive role: the minimum of the potential allows for large mixing angles - in contrast to the simplest quark case - and predicts a maximal Majorana phase. This points in turn to a strong correlation between neutrino mass hierarchy and mixing pattern. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.