Confronting the low-scale seesaw and leptogenesis with neutrinoless double beta decay

We revisit the impact of heavy neutrinos with masses in the MeV-GeV range on neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) in view of updated results for the lifetime of this process. Working in a minimal realistic extension of the Standard Model by two right-handed neutrino flavours, we show that the non-observation of 0νββ will impose strong bounds on the heavy neutrino properties that are complementary to the limits obtained from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and collider searches. For an inverted mass hierarchy of the light neutrinos we find that improved limits on 0νββ from next-generation experiments will restrict the allowed parameter space for fixed mass splitting to narrow bands in the mass-mixing plane. Further combining this with the requirement to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe via leptogenesis reduces these bands to windows in parameter space that are constrained in all directions and can be targeted by direct searches at accelerators. For a normal mass hierarchy, only parts of the parameter space can be probed by such experiments.