Degenerate neutrino masses need a special flavor symmetry at work for the tree-level configuration. Majorana neutrinos require SO(3). We show that the presence of threshold corrections to neutrino masses at the electroweak scale may destroy the degenerate pattern and generate the observed neutrino mixing.

Compared to the case with different Majorana CP-phases for each mass eigenstate, the exact degenerate scenario has no mixing at tree-level. We compare both situations with a special focus on the exact degenerate pattern which gets altered by virtue of supersymmmetric threshold corrections in a seesaw-extended MSSM. Non-minimal flavor violation in the soft breaking terms allows to produce the desired mixing and deviations from equal masses. Such a description may hint to flavor symmetries in SUSY breaking. A solution of the flavor puzzle is then connected to a solution how to break supersymmetry.