Neutrino mixing angles and eigenstates; CP properties and mass hierarchies

Abstract

In the presence of independent generations of leptons, I show that the same type of ambiguity in the mass spectrum arises as was discussed in ref.[1] for neutral kaons. It results from the freedom to add to their Majorana mass matrix, usually taken to be symmetric, an antisymmetric term which vanishes as soon as fermions belonging to different generations anticommute. In the simple examples proposed, dealing with two generations, this procedure introduces an extra (mass) parameter $ρ$, which is shown to connect the (CP violating) mixing angle to the hierarchy of neutrino masses. We use this opportunity to investigate the relations between the two; in particular, large hierarchies are no longer preferentially attached to small mixing angles; this can be relevant for the ``Large Mixing Angle'' solution strongly advocated by recent experiments on neutrinos oscillations. I discuss how the $ρ$ parameter could be fixed, which appears, in the absence of a substructure for leptons, still more delicate than for kaons.