Near Maximal Atmospheric Neutrino Mixing in Neutrino Mass Models with Two Texture Zeros

The implications of a large value of the effective Majorana neutrino mass for a class of two texture zero neutrino mass matrices have been studied in the flavor basis. It is found that these textures predict near maximal atmospheric neutrino mixing angle in the limit of large effective Majorana neutrino mass. It is noted that this prediction is independent of the values of solar and reactor neutrino mixing angles. We present the symmetry realization of these textures using the discrete cyclic group $Z_3$. It is found that the texture zeros realised in this work remain stable under renormalization group running of the neutrino mass matrix from the seesaw scale to the electroweak scale, at one loop level.