Cobimaximal lepton mixing from soft symmetry breaking

Cobimaximal lepton mixing, i.e. θ23=45° and δ=±90° in the lepton mixing matrix V, arises as a consequence of SV=V⁎P, where S is the permutation matrix that interchanges the second and third rows of V and P is a diagonal matrix of phase factors. We prove that any such V may be written in the form V=URP, where U is any predefined unitary matrix satisfying SU=U⁎, R is an orthogonal, i.e. real, matrix, and P is a diagonal matrix satisfying P2=P. Using this theorem, we demonstrate the equivalence of two ways of constructing models for cobimaximal mixing—one way that uses a standard CP symmetry and a different way that uses a CP symmetry including μ–τ interchange. We also present two simple seesaw models to illustrate this equivalence; those models have, in addition to the CP symmetry, flavour symmetries broken softly by the Majorana mass terms of the right-handed neutrino singlets. Since each of the two models needs four scalar doublets, we investigate how to accommodate the Standard Model Higgs particle in them.