Long-range neutrinoless double beta decay mechanisms

Understand

Understanding the origin of lepton number violation is one of the fundamental questions in particle physics today.

• Neutrinoless double beta decay provides a way in which this violation can be tested.
• In this article, we derive the form of hadronic and leptonic matrix elements for all possible long-range mechanisms of neutrinoless double beta decay.
• With these, we calculate the numerical values of the nuclear matrix elements (NME) and phase space factors (PSF) by making use of the interacting boson model of the nucleus (IBM-2) for NMEs and of exact Dirac wave functions for the PSFs.