Dirac neutrinos in the 2HDM with restrictive Abelian symmetries

Recently, there has been a growing interest in extensions of the Standard Model in which naturally small Dirac neutrino masses arise due to existence of a symmetry which protects neutrino's Diracness. Motivated by this, we consider an extension of the Standard Model with a second Higgs doublet (2HDM) and three right-handed neutrinos where lepton number is conserved and, thus, neutrinos are Dirac particles. In this framework, we identify the most restrictive texture-zero combinations for the Dirac-neutrino and charged-lepton mass matrices that lead to masses and mixings compatible with current experimental data. We then investigate, in a systematic way, which of these combinations can be realized by Abelian continuous U(1) or discrete $\mathbb{Z}_N$ symmetries. We conclude that, from the 28 initially possible sets of maximally-restricted lepton mass matrices, only 5 have a symmetry realization in the 2HDM. For these cases, one-to-one relations among the Yukawa couplings and the neutrino mass and mixing parameters are established, and the fermion interactions with the neutral and charged scalars of the 2HDM are also determined. Consequences for lepton universality in $\tau$ decays and rare lepton-flavor-violating processes are also discussed.