Probing Majorana neutrinos with double-$\beta$ decay

Abstract

A discovery that neutrinos are not the usual Dirac but Majorana fermions, i.e. identical to their antiparticles, would be a manifestation of new physics with profound implications for particle physics and cosmology. Majorana neutrinos would generate neutrinoless double-$\beta$ ($0\nu \beta \beta$) decay, a matter-creating process without the balancing emission of antimatter. So far, 0$\nu \beta \beta$ decay has eluded detection. The GERDA collaboration searches for the $0\nu \beta \beta$ decay of ${}^{76}$Ge by operating bare germanium detectors in an active liquid argon shield. With a total exposure of 82.4 kg$\cdot$yr, we observe no signal and derive a lower half-life limit of T${}_{1/2}$ > 0.9$\cdot$10${}^{26}$ yr (90% C.L.). Our T${}_{1/2}$ sensitivity assuming no signal is 1.1$\cdot$10${}^{26}$ yr. Combining the latter with those from other $0\nu \beta \beta$ decay searches yields a sensitivity to the effective Majorana neutrino mass of 0.07 - 0.16 eV, with corresponding sensitivities to the absolute mass scale in $\beta$ decay of 0.15 - 0.44 eV, and to the cosmological relevant sum of neutrino masses of 0.46 - 1.3 eV.

arXiv commentAuthors' main+supplementary text: 13+28 pages, 3+12 figures, 1+7 tables. Definite version to be published in Science

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