Neutrinoless double-beta decay from an effective field theory for heavy nuclei

Abstract

We study neutrinoless double-beta decay in an effective field theory (EFT) for heavy nuclei, which are treated as a spherical core coupled to additional neutrons and/or protons. Since the low-energy constants of the EFT cannot be fitted to data for this unobserved decay, we follow an alternative strategy to constrain these through a correlation with double Gamow-Teller transitions. This correlation was recently found to hold for shell-model calculations, energy-density functionals, and other nuclear structure models. We therefore first calculate the nuclear matrix elements for double Gamow-Teller transitions in the EFT for heavy nuclei. The combination of the EFT uncertainty with the correlation uncertainty enables predictions of nuclear matrix elements for neutrinoless double-beta decay for a broad range of isotopes with quantified uncertainties. Generally the EFT predicts smaller nuclear matrix elements compared to other approaches, but our EFT results are consistent with recent ab initio calculations.

13 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables, minor changes, published version

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Toward the discovery of matter creation with neutrinoless double-beta decay
• Ab initio uncertainty quantification of neutrinoless double-beta decay in ${}^{76}$Ge
• Neutrinoless $\beta \beta$-decay nuclear matrix elements from two-neutrino $\beta \beta$-decay data
• Correlations Between Neutrinoless Double-Beta, Double Gamow-Teller and Double-Magnetic Decays in the pnQRPA Framework
• Neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay and double Gamow-Teller transitions
• Two-neutrino $\beta \beta$ decay of ${}^{136}$Xe to the first excited $0^{+}$ state in ${}^{136}$Ba
• Radiative and exchange corrections for two-neutrino double-beta decay
• Configuration mixing effects on neutrinoless $\beta \beta$-decay nuclear matrix elements
• Effective field theories for collective excitations of atomic nuclei
• Neutrinoless $\beta \beta$ decay in the interacting boson model based on the nuclear energy density functionals
• Two-neutrino $\beta \beta$ decay to excited states at next-to-leading order