Weak basis transformations and texture zeros in the leptonic sector

We investigate the physical meaning of some of the texture zeros which appear in most of the ansatzes on leptonic masses and their mixing. It is shown that starting from arbitrary lepton mass matrices and making suitable weak basis transformations one can obtain some of these sets of zeros, which therefore have no physical content. We then analyse four-zero texture ansatzes where the charged lepton and neutrino mass matrices have the same structure. The four texture zeros cannot be obtained simultaneously through weak basis transformations, so these ansatzes do have physical content. We show that they can be separated into four classes and Study the physical implications of each class. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.