Neutrinoless double beta decay in seesaw models
By Mattias Blennow, Enrique Fernandez-Martinez, J. Lopez-Pavon, J. Menendez. 2010
174 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the general phenomenology of neutrinoless double beta decay in seesaw models. In particular, we focus on the dependence of the neutrinoless double beta decay rate on the mass of the extra states introduced to account for the Majorana masses of light neutrinos. For this purpose, we compute the nuclear matrix elements as functions of the mass of the mediating fermions and estimate the associated uncertainties. We then discuss what can be inferred on the seesaw model parameters in the different mass regimes and clarify how the contribution of the light neutrinos should always be taken into account when deriving bounds on the extra parameters. Conversely, the extra states can also have a significant impact, canceling the Standard Model neutrino contribution for masses lighter than the nuclear scale and leading to unobservable neutrinoless double beta decay amplitudes even if neutrinos are Majorana particles. In particular, the decay rate is reduced by at least six orders of magnitude for masses of the extra states below 1 MeV in absence of extra contributions. We also discuss how seesaw models could reconcile large rates of neutrinoless double beta decay with more stringent cosmological bounds on neutrino masses.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f6e8fdde61c47ccbdf46cc3dd30433a80adeaf4
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Citations in the corpus
- Neutrinoless double beta decay versus other probes of heavy sterile neutrinos (2019, methodology): “These include the quasiparticle random phase approximation (QRPA) [199, 200], interacting boson model (IBM-2) [201, 203, 204] and interacting shell model (ISM) [202].”
- A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “The second term gives the contribution of the light right handed neutrinos, and can be significant only if some of the masses MI are above and some are below the typical nuclear momentum transfer [405, 600, 601].”
- Heavy Neutral Leptons at FASER (2018, background): “0νββ rate may occur and effectively weaken the corresponding bound [73].”
- The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “The lepton number violation is sufficient if at least one eigenvalue of MM is larger than the exchanged momentum ∼ 100 MeV [127–129], see also [106, 130].”
- Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, unknown): “1 GeV [634, 636].”
- Challenges in Double Beta Decay (2013, background): “Indeed, the calculation of 𝛽𝛽(0]) NME’s has been carried out by many authors using different methods: the Quasi-particle random phase approximation [39–41] (QPRPA, RQPRPA, pnQPRPA etc.), the nuclear shell model [42, 43] (NSM), the Interacting Boson Model [44] (IBM), the generating coordinate metho”
- Sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2018, background): “stence of a keV neutrino in principle allows to make predictions for this rate [517]. However, since heavy neutrinos with M I <100 MeV themselves cannot give a signicant contribution to the decay [513], this impact is always indirect and therefore strongly model dependent, i.e., it relies on assu”
- Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: 2015 Review (2016, background): “, it is below the value in (19)) and Type I Seesaw applies, the contribution of RHneutrinos cancels the one of ordinary neutrinos [107, 108].”