The mu term and neutrino masses

by Dr Patrick Vaudrevange

Friday 26 Oct 2012, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Paris

Room 149, Batiment 1 (LPSC)

The Giudice-Masiero mechanism explains why the mu term is of the order of the gravitino mass, but does not explain why the holomorphic mass term is absent in the superpotential. I discuss anomaly-free discrete symmetries to address this, proving that such symmetries must be discrete R symmetries. Then I present Z_M^R symmetries in detail demonstrating that they can simultaneously forbid proton decay operators. All Z_M^R symmetries are anomaly-free due to a non-trivial transformation of a Green-Schwarz axion, and, as a consequence, a holomorphic mu term appears at the non-perturbative level. There is a unique symmetry that is consistent with the Weinberg operator while there is a class of Z_M^R symmetries which explain suppressed Dirac neutrino masses.