masses. The problem with this is that the neutrino masses are surprisingly smaller than the rest of the known particles (at least 600,000 times smaller than the mass of an electron), which, while it does not invalidate the theory, is widely regarded as unsatisfactory as this construction offers no insight into the origin of the neutrino mass scale. The next simplest addition would be to add into the Standard Model right-handed neutrinos that interact with the left-handed neutrinos and the Higgs field in an analogous way to the rest of the fermions. These new neutrinos would interact with the other fermions solely in this way and hence would not be directly observable, so are not phenomenologically excluded. The problem of the disparity of the mass scales remains. Seesaw mechanism The most popular conjectured solution currently is the seesaw mechanism, where right-handed neutrinos with very large Majorana masses are added. If the right-handed neutrinos are very heavy, they induce a very small mass for the left-handed neutrinos, which is proportional to the reciprocal of the heavy mass. If it is assumed that the neutrinos interact with the Higgs field with approximately the same strengths as the charged fermions do, the heavy mass should be close to the GUT scale. Because the Standard Model has only one fundamental mass scale, all particle masses must arise in relation to this scale. There are other varieties of seesaw and there is currently great interest in the so-called low-scale seesaw schemes, such as the inverse seesaw mechanism. The addition of right-handed neutrinos has the effect of adding new mass scales, unrelated to the mass scale of the Standard Model, hence the observation of heavy right-handed neutrinos would reveal physics beyond the Standard Model. Right-handed neutrinos would help to explain the origin of matter through a mechanism known as leptogenesis. Other sources There are alternative ways to modify the standard model that are similar to the addition of heavy right-handed neutrinos (e.g., the addition of new scalars or fermions in triplet states) and other modifications that are less similar (e.g., neutrino masses from loop effects and/or from suppressed couplings). One example of the last type of models is provided by certain versions supersymmetric extensions of the standard model of fundamental interactions, where R parity is not a symmetry. There, the exchange of supersymmetric particles such as squarks and sleptons can break the lepton number and lead