Tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing and the image flavor symmetry Original Research Article

We present a supersymmetric image model for the tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing, and the complete flavor group is image. At leading order, the residual symmetry of the charged lepton sector is image, and the image symmetry is broken completely in the neutrino sector. The charged lepton mass hierarchies are determined by the spontaneous breaking of the flavor symmetry, both the type I see-saw mechanism and the Weinberg operator contribute to generating the light neutrino masses. Tri-bimaximal mixing is exact at leading order while subleading contributions introduce corrections of order image to the three lepton mixing angles. The vacuum alignment and subleading corrections are studied in detail, a moderate hierarchy of order image between the vacuum expectation values of the flavon fields in the charged lepton and neutrino sectors can be accommodated.