An expansion for Neutrino Phenomenology

We develop a formalism for constructing the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata (PMNS) matrix and neutrino masses using an expansion that originates when a sequence of heavy right handed neutrinos are integrated out, assuming a seesaw mechanism for the origin of neutrino masses. The expansion establishes relationships between the structure of the PMNS matrix and the mass differences of neutrinos, and allows symmetry implications for measured deviations from tri-bimaximal form to be studied systematically. Our approach does not depend on choosing the rotation between the weak and mass eigenstates of the charged lepton fields to be diagonal. We comment on using this expansion to examine the symmetry implications of the recent results from the Daya-Bay collaboration reporting the discovery of a non zero value for theta_{13}, indicating a deviation from tri-bimaximal form, with a significance of 5.2 sigma.