Neutrinoless double beta decay in minimal left-right symmetric model with universal seesaw

We present a detailed discussion on neutrinoless double beta decay (0 nu beta beta) within left-right symmetric models based on the gauge symmetry of type SU(2)(L) x SU(2)(R) x U(1)(B-L) as well as SU(3)(L )x SU(3)(R) x U(1)(X) where fermion masses including that of neutrinos are generated through a universal seesaw mechanism. We find that one or more of the right-handed neutrinos could be as light as a few keV if left-right symmetry breaking occurs in the range of a few TeV to 100 TeV. With such light right-handed neutrinos, we perform a detailed study of new physics contributions to 0 nu beta beta and constrain the model parameters from the latest experimental bound on such a rare decay process. We find that the new physics contribution to 0 nu beta beta in such a scenario, particularly the heavy-light neutrino mixing diagrams, can individually saturate the existing experimental bounds, but their contributions to total 0 nu beta beta half-life cancel each other due to unitarity of the total 6 x 6 mass matrix. The effective contribution to half-life therefore, arises from the purely left and purely right neutrino and gauge boson mediated diagrams. We find that the parameter space saturating the 0 nu beta beta bounds remains allowed from the latest experimental bounds on charged lepton flavor violating decays like mu -> e gamma. We finally include the bounds from cosmology and supernova to constrain the parameter space of the model.