Up-down unification, neutrino masses, and rare lepton decays

In a recent paper, we showed that tree level up-down unification of fermion Yukawa couplings is a natural consequence of a large class of supersymmetric models. They can lead to viable quark masses and mixings for moderately large values of tan beta with interesting and testable predictions for CP violation in the hadronic sector. In this letter, we extend our discussion to the leptonic sector focusing on one particular class of these models, the supersymmetric left-right model with the seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses. We show that fitting the solar and the atmospheric neutrino data considerably restricts the Majorana-Yukawa couplings of the leptons in this model and leads to predictions for the decay tau --> mu + gamma, which is found to be accessible to the next generation of rare decay searches. We also show that the resulting parameter space of the model is consistent with the requirements of generating adequate baryon asymmetry through lepton-number violating decays of the right-handed neutrino. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.