Long-range neutrinoless double beta decay mechanisms

Abstract

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. We show that:\ (I) lepton number violation can occur even with zero (or very small) neutrino mass and (II) the angular correlations of the emitted electrons can distinguish between different models of non-standard (NS) mechanisms. We set limits on the coupling constants of some NS models, in particular Left-Right models and SUSY models.