Trimaximal neutrino mixing from vacuum alignment in A4 and S4 models

Understand

Recent T2K results indicate a sizeable reactor angle theta_13 which would rule out exact tri-bimaximal lepton mixing.

• We study the vacuum alignment of the Altarelli-Feruglio A4 family symmetry model including additional flavons in the 1' and 1" representations and show that it leads to trimaximal mixing in which the second column of the lepton mixing matrix consists of the column vector (1,1,1)^T/sqrt{3}, with a potentially large reactor angle.
• In order to limit the reactor angle and control the higher order corrections, we propose a renormalisable S4 model in which the 1' and 1" flavons of A4 are unified into a doublet of S4 which is spontaneously broken to A4 by a flavon which enters the neutrino sector at higher order.
• We study the vacuum alignment in the S4 model and show that it predicts accurate trimaximal mixing with approximate tri-bimaximal mixing, leading to a new mixing sum rule testable in future neutrino experiments.