Effective Theories of Neutrino Masses

The importance of improving the bounds on those effective non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) which are a signal of all fermionic-mediated Seesaws is stressed: they are revealed as non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix, and at experimental reach for seesaw scales ⩽ O(TeV). Some recent activity in the literature on other - theoretically not well motivated - ill-constrained NSI are also summarized. Furthermore, the status of the simplest Seesaw scenario with only two heavy neutrinos is reviewed. This model happens to be a explicit realization of the effective Minimal Flavour Violation approach. We derive the scalar potential for the fields whose background values are the Yukawa couplings of that model, and explore its minima. The Majorana character plays a distinctive role: the minimum of the potential allows for large mixing angles - in contrast to the simplest quark case - and predicts a maximal Majorana phase. This points in turn to a strong correlation between neutrino mass hierarchy and mixing pattern.