Large Lepton Mixings from Continuous Symmetries

Within the broad context of quark-lepton unification, we investigate the implications of broken continuous family symmetries which result from requiring that in the limit of exact symmetry, the Dirac mass matrices yield hierarchical masses for the quarks and charged leptons, but lead to degenerate light neutrino masses as a consequence of the seesaw mechanism, without requiring hierarchical right-handed neutrino mass terms. Quark mixing is then naturally small and proportional to the size of the perturbation, but lepton mixing is large as a result of degenerate perturbation theory, shifted from maximal mixing by the size of the perturbation. Within this approach, we study an illustrative two-family prototype model with an SO(2) family symmetry, and discuss extensions to three-family models.