Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the muonic analogue of neutrinoless double beta decay (?1, ?+) conversion. We study several lepton number violating (LNV) mechanisms potentially triggering this process: ex-change by light and heavy Majorana neutrinos as well as exchange by supersymmetric particles participating in R-parity violating interactions. The nuclear structure is taken into account within the renormalized quasi-particle random phase approximation method. This is the first realistic treatment of nuclear structure aspects of the (?-, ?+) conversion. We estimate the rate of this process utilizing the existing experimental constraints on the parameters of the underlying LNV interactions and conclude that the (?-, ?+) conversion will hardly be detectable in the near future experiments. ©2002 The American Physical Society.