R-parity violating flavor symmetries, recent neutrino data, and absolute neutrino mass scale

We study the role of a very general type of flavor symmetry in controlling the strength of R-parity violation in supersymmetric models. We assume that only leptons are charged under a global symmetry whose breaking induces lepton number (and, hence, R-parity) violation. The charge assignments of leptons under this symmetry are such that the total number of independent lepton number violating couplings is reduced from 39 to 6. The most severe constraints on these flavor-correlated couplings arise from neutrino masses and mixing as well as from the nonobservation of K-L -> mu e. We find that such a scenario predicts an almost vanishing smallest neutrino mass eigenvalue, allowing the upcoming generation of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments to shed light on the hierarchy.