Origin of Quark-Lepton Flavor in SO(10) with Type II Seesaw

Abstract

Diverse mass and mixing patterns between the quarks and leptons makes it challenging to construct a simple grand unified theory of flavor. We show that SO(10) SUSY GUTs with type II seesaw mechanism giving neutrino masses provide a natural framework for addressing this issue. A simple ansatz that the dominant Yukawa matrix (the 10-Higgs coupling to matter) has rank one, appears to simultaneously explain both the large lepton mixings as well as the observed quark flavor hierarchy in these models. A testable prediction of this ansatz is the neutrino mixing, U_{e3}, which should be observable in planned long baseline experiments.

24 pages, 8 figures