Neutrinoless double beta decay and neutrino mass

By J. Vergados, H. Ejiri, Fedor Simkovic. 2016

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay (DBD) will have important consequences. First it will signal that lepton number is not conserved and the neutrinos are Majorana particles. Second, it represents our best hope for determining the absolute neutrino mass scale at the level of a few tens of meV. To achieve the last goal, however, certain hurdles have to be overcome involving particle, nuclear and experimental physics. Particle physics is important since it provides the mechanisms for neutrinoless DBD. In this review, we emphasize the light neutrino mass mechanism. Nuclear physics is important for extracting the useful information from the data. One must accurately evaluate the relevant nuclear matrix elements (NMEs), a formidable task. To this end, we review the recently developed sophisticated nuclear structure approaches, employing different methods and techniques of calculation. We also examine the question of quenching of the axial vector coupling constant, which may have important consequences on the size of the NMEs. From an experimental point of view it is challenging, since the life times are extremely long and one has to fight against formidable backgrounds. One needs large isotopically enriched sources and detectors with good energy resolution and very low background.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41f980916878070db09c84fb10b1847d1e857737

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Tórtola
2. A. Marrone
3. E. Lisi
4. A. Palazzo
5. O. Mena
6. A. Melchiorri
7. Francesco Capozzi
8. E. di Valentino

Citations in the corpus

• Value of the Axial-Vector Coupling Strength in β and ββ Decays: A Review (2017, methodology): “Accurate knowledge of the NMEs is required in order that the data will be optimally used to obtain information about the fundamental nature and mass of the neutrino [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].”
• Global constraints on absolute neutrino masses and their ordering (2017, background): “up to gA [52], while the 3σ range goes down to gA 1⁄4 0.”
• 2020 global reassessment of the neutrino oscillation picture (2020, background): “which correspond to the proposed 1σ range from [99] (see Tab.”