Neutrinoless double-<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>β</mml:mi></mml:math> decay from an effective field theory for heavy nuclei
C. Brase, J. Menéndez, E. A. Coello Pérez, A. Schwenk
Abstract
We study neutrinoless double-$\ensuremath{\beta}$ decay in an effective field theory (EFT) for heavy nuclei, which are treated as a spherical core coupled to additional neutrons and/or protons. Since the low-energy constants of the EFT cannot be fitted to data for this unobserved decay, we follow an alternative strategy to constrain these through a correlation with double Gamow-Teller transitions. This correlation was recently found to hold for shell-model calculations, energy-density functionals, and other nuclear structure models. We therefore first calculate the nuclear matrix elements for double Gamow-Teller transitions in the EFT for heavy nuclei. The combination of the EFT uncertainty with the correlation uncertainty enables predictions of nuclear matrix elements for neutrinoless double-$\ensuremath{\beta}$ decay for a broad range of isotopes with quantified uncertainties. Generally the EFT predicts smaller nuclear matrix elements compared to other approaches, but our EFT results are consistent with recent ab initio calculations.