Abstract: We discuss contributions to neutrinoless double beta (0 nu beta beta) decay involving vector bosons. The starting point is a list of all possible vector representations that may contribute to 0 nu beta beta decay via d = 9 or d = 11 operators at tree level. We then identify gauge groups which contain these vectors in the adjoint representation. Even though the complete list of vector fields that can contribute to 0 nu beta beta up to d = 11 is large (a total of 46 vectors), only a few of them can be gauge bosons of phenomenologically realistic groups. These latter cases are discussed in some more detail, and lower (upper) limits on gauge boson masses (mixing angles) are derived from the absence of 0 nu beta beta decay.

Abstract: Dirac neutrino masses require two distinct neutral Weyl spinors per generation, with a special arrangement of masses and interactions with charged leptons. Once this arrangement is perturbed, lepton number is no longer conserved and neutrinos become Majorana particles. If these lepton number violating perturbations are small compared to the Dirac mass terms, neutrinos are quasi-Dirac particles. Alternatively, this scenario can be characterized by the existence of pairs of neutrinos with almost degenerate masses, and a lepton mixing matrix which has 12 angles and 12 phases. In this work we discuss the phenomenology of quasi-Dirac neutrino oscillations and derive limits on the relevant parameter space from various experiments. In one parameter perturbations of the Dirac limit, very stringent bounds can be derived on the mass splittings between the almost degenerate pairs of neutrinos. However, we also demonstrate that with suitable changes to the lepton mixing matrix, limits on such mass splittings are much weaker, or even completely absent. Finally, we consider the possibility that the mass splittings are too small to be measured and discuss bounds on the new, nonstandard lepton mixing angles from current experiments for this case.

Abstract: We study systematically the decomposition of the Weinberg operator at three-loop order. There are more than four thousand connected topologies. However, the vast majority of these are infinite corrections to lower order neutrino mass diagrams and only a very small percentage yields models for which the three-loop diagrams are the leading order contribution to the neutrino mass matrix. We identify 73 topologies that can lead to genuine three-loop models with fermions and scalars, i.e. models for which lower order diagrams are automatically absent without the need to invoke additional symmetries. The 73 genuine topologies can be divided into two sub-classes: normal genuine ones (44 cases) and special genuine topologies (29 cases). The latter are a special class of topologies, which can lead to genuine diagrams only for very specific choices of fields. The genuine topologies generate 374 diagrams in the weak basis, which can be reduced to only 30 distinct diagrams in the mass eigenstate basis. We also discuss how all the mass eigenstate diagrams can be described in terms of only five master integrals. We present some concrete models and for two of them we give numerical estimates for the typical size of neutrino masses they generate. Our results can be readily applied to construct other d = 5 neutrino mass models with three loops.