We study leptonic CP violation from a new perspective. For Majorana neutrinos, a new parametrization for leptonic mixing of the form $V=O_{23} O_{12} K_{a}^{i}cdot O$ reveals interesting aspects that are less clear in the standard parametrization. We
identify several important scenario-cases with mixing angles in agreement with experiment and leading to large leptonic CP violation. If neutrinos happen to be quasi-degenerate, this new parametrization might be very useful, e.g., in reducing the number of relevant parameters of models.
Several popular Ansatze of lepton mass matrices that contain texture zeros are confronted with current neutrino observational data. We perform a systematic $chi^2$-analysis in a wide class of schemes, considering arbitrary Hermitian charged lepton ma
ss matrices and symmetric mass matrices for Majorana neutrinos or Hermitian mass matrices for Dirac neutrinos. Our study reveals that several patterns are still consistent with all the observations at 68.27% confidence level, while some others are disfavored or excluded by the experimental data. The well-known Frampton-Glashow-Marfatia two-zero textures, hybrid textures and parallel structures, among others, are considered.
We present the invited lectures given at the Third IDPASC School which took place in Santiago de Compostela in January 2013. The students attending the school had very different backgrounds, some of them were doing their Ph.D. in experimental particl
e physics, others in theory. As a result, and in order to make the lectures useful for most of the students, we focused on basic topics of broad interest, avoiding the more technical aspects of Flavour Physics and CP Violation. We make a brief review of the Standard Model, paying special attention to the generation of fermion masses and mixing, as well as to CP violation. We describe some of the simplest extensions of the SM, emphasising novel flavour aspects which arise in their framework.
We investigate the physical meaning of some of the texture zeros which appear in most of the Ansatze on leptonic masses and their mixing. It is shown that starting from arbitrary lepton mass matrices and making suitable weak basis transformations one
can obtain some of these sets of zeros, which therefore have no physical content. We then analyse four-zero texture Ansatze where the charged lepton and neutrino mass matrices have the same structure. The four texture zeros cannot be obtained simultaneously through weak basis transformations, so these Ansatze do have physical content. We show that they can be separated into four classes and study the physical implications of each class.
