Neutrino masses and mixing with seesaw mechanism and universal breaking of extended democracy

In the framework of a minimal extension of the SM, where the only additional fields are three right-handed neutrinos, we suggest that the charged lepton, the Dirac neutrino and the right-handed Majorana neutrino mass matrices are all, to leading approximation, proportional to the democratic matrix. With the further assumption that the breaking of this extended democracy is universal for all leptonic mass matrices, a large mixing in the 2-3 sector can be obtained and is linked to the seesaw mechanism, together with the existence of a strong hierarchy in the masses of right-handed neutrinos. The structure of the resulting effective mass matrix of light neutrinos is stable against the RGE evolution, and a good fit to all solar and atmospheric neutrino data is obtained. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.