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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 172501 |
| Journal | Physical Review Letters |
| Volume | 121 |
| Issue number | 17 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 25 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
We thank Emanuele Mereghetti and Vincenzo Cirigliano for helpful conversations and correspondence and Emanuele for pointing out a mistake in our original chiral extrapolation formulas. Numerical calculations were performed with the chroma software suite with quda inverters on Surface at LLNL, supported by the LLNL Multiprogrammatic and Institutional Computing program through a Tier 1 Grand Challenge award, and on Titan, a resource of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Award No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, through an INCITE award. The calculations were efficiently interleaved with those in Ref. using metaq . This work was supported by the NVIDIA Corporation (MAC), DFG, and NSFC through funds provided to the Sino-German CRC 110 “Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in QCD” (E. B.), a RIKEN SPDR fellowship (E. R.), the Leverhulme Trust (N. G.), the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science: Office of Nuclear Physics (E. B., D. A. B., C. C. C., T. K., H. M. C., A. N., E. R., B. J., P. V., A. W. L.); Office of Advanced Scientific Computing (E. B., B. J., T. K., A. W. L.); Nuclear Physics Double Beta Decay Topical Collaboration (D. A. B., H. M. C., A. W. L., A. N.); the DOE Early Career Award Program (D. A. B., C. C. C., H. M. C., A. W. L.); and the LLNL Livermore Graduate Scholar Program (D. A. B.). This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by LLNL under Award No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 (E. B., E. R., P. V.), and by LBNL under Award No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, under which the Regents of the University of California manage and operate LBNL. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY15-15738 (B. C. T.) and NSF PHY-1748958, and parts of this work were completed at the program “Frontiers in Nuclear Physics” (NUCLEAR16). This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by LLNL under Award No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 (E.B., E.R., P.V.), and by LBNL under Award No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, under which the Regents of the University of California manage and operate LBNL. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY15-15738 (B.C.T.) and NSF PHY-1748958, and parts of this work were completed at the program Frontiers in Nuclear Physics (NUCLEAR16).