Investigating neutrino masses in supersymmetric GUT extensions of the standard model

Abstract

The Standard Model of particle physics is the crowning achievement of modern science, providing a fundamental and complete description of the nature of matter, fields and their interactions. In 2012, the 5σ detection of the Higgs boson at CERN provided the last experimental verification for the Standard Model.

However, the Standard Model does not provide an appealing explanation for the phenomena of non-zero neutrino masses. In fact, the Standard Model is perfectly compatible with massless neutrinos. The discovery of non-zero neutrino mass via neutrino oscillations hence provides a window into Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics, demanding new frameworks to explain how neutrino masses might fit in a unified framework.

In this thesis, we will explore models that explain the neutrino mass and mixing matrices. We first do so by extending the Standard Model framework to incorporate neutrino mass generation mechanisms. We then investigate the Left-Right Symmetric Model (LRSM), which unifies the left- and right-handed fields, as well as the supersymmetric (SUSY) Grand Unified SU(5), which unifies the gauge coupling constants at a high energy scale. Original contributions of this thesis include model construction at the LRSM scale for neutrino masses, as well as model construction for the neutrino mass mixing matrix in the SUSY SU(5) framework. Additionally, explicit calculations involving the irreducible representations of the SU(5) group are presented.