학술논문

Heavy Physics Contributions to Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay from QCD
Document Type
article
Source
Physical Review Letters. 121(17)
Subject
Nuclear and Plasma Physics
Particle and High Energy Physics
Physical Sciences
nucl-th
hep-lat
hep-ph
nucl-ex
Mathematical Sciences
Engineering
General Physics
Mathematical sciences
Physical sciences
Language
Abstract
Observation of neutrinoless double beta decay, a lepton number violating process that has been proposed to clarify the nature of neutrino masses, has spawned an enormous world-wide experimental effort. Relating nuclear decay rates to high-energy, beyond the standard model (BSM) physics requires detailed knowledge of nonperturbative QCD effects. Using lattice QCD, we compute the necessary matrix elements of short-range operators, which arise due to heavy BSM mediators, that contribute to this decay via the leading order π^{-}→π^{+} exchange diagrams. Utilizing our result and taking advantage of effective field theory methods will allow for model-independent calculations of the relevant two-nucleon decay, which may then be used as input for nuclear many-body calculations of the relevant experimental decays. Contributions from short-range operators may prove to be equally important to, or even more important than, those from long-range Majorana neutrino exchange.