Neutrinoless double beta decay, neutrino mass and bilinear R-parity breaking supersymmetry

Neutrinoless double beta (beta beta(ov)) decay violates lepton number; its absence stringently constrains the parameters of theories beyond the standard model in which the neutrino has a Majorana mass. R-parity violating weak-scale supersymmetry is a prominent example of such models. Double beta decay in supersymmetry with explicit bilinear R-parity breaking is discussed and current limits on the beta beta(ov), decay half life of Ge-76 are used to extract upper bounds on the R-parity breaking parameters of the first generation. Moreover, it is shown that the effective Majorana neutrino mass, measured in beta beta(ov), decay, is non-zero once the 1-loop corrections are taken into account even for the case of perfect alignment (Lambda(i) := ([<(nu)over tilde>]mu - nu(1)epsilon(i)) = 0) among the R-parity violating parameters.