Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with Composite Neutrinos

Abstract

We study in detail the contribution of heavy composite Majorana neutrinos to neutrino-less double beta decay. Our analysis confirms the result of a previous estimate by two of the authors. Excited neutrinos couple to the electroweak gauge bosons through a magnetic type effective Lagrangian. The relevant nuclear matrix element is related to matrix elements available in the literature and current bounds on the half-life of neutrino-less double beta decay are converted into bounds on the compositeness scale and/or the heavy neutrino mass. Our bounds are of the same order of magnitude as those available from accelerator experiments.