Flavor mixing patterns of neutrinos-An overview

The observation of neutrino oscillations at SuperKamiokande, SNO etc. has undoubtedly established neutrino physics as one of the most interesting regimes of high energy physics. This phenomenon, hinting at the non-zero neutrino masses and mixings, provided a smoking gun signal for exploring the physics beyond the standard model (BSM). Owing to the significant advances on the theoretical and experimental fronts, the last couple of decades have turned out to be quite fruitful for our understanding of leptonic mixing parameters. In this context, the recent ‘precise’ measurement of lepton mixing angle θ13 has not only signaled the existence of CP violation in the leptonic sector, but has also deepened the mystery of flavor mixing further as the quark and lepton mixing patterns now seem to be quite different from each other. To this end, several ideas have been proposed, by introducing various flavor symmetries, in order to explain the observed leptonic mixing pattern. In the present article, we aim to present an overview of advances made in this direction by discussing the trimaximal, bimaximal, democratic, hexagonal flavor mixing patterns. Some of the upcoming experiments intending to unravel these mysteries of flavor mixing patterns would also be discussed briefly.